


Sour

by foux_dogue



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Emotional Manipulation, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Hedonist Linhardt, Infidelity, Instances of dubious consent, Lovelorn Felix, M/M, Minor canon divergence for storytelling purposes, POV Multiple, Possessive Sylvain, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Pressures of nobility, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Spans pre-timeskip to postgame, War, dark themes, long fic, sylvix - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2020-10-28 06:04:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 66,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20773754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foux_dogue/pseuds/foux_dogue
Summary: Felix and Sylvain have always had a bittersweet relationship. While Felix has been both a victim and a beneficiary of it, their bond becomes more complicated when they find themselves saddled by the responsibilities of their respective titles.Amidst it all — the war, Dimitri’s rise to power and the settling of a unified Fodlan, and even the inevitability of marriage and the advancement of their houses — Felix knows that what matters most is to determine just how much sweetness truly underlies everything else his oldest friend has to offer him. But what will it take to force his hand?





	1. The Old Hustle

Sylvain had been stealing from him since they’d been little boys.

The first thing he’d taken had been a little soldier made from tin. It was only one of many from the neat-wrapped box that Felix’s uncle had given him for his sixth birthday but still, it’d made his chest burn with self-righteous anger when he’d spotted the soldier’s purple-painted tunic among Sylvain’s ranks as they’d staged a war together in the mud.

If the theft had happened later in his life Felix likely would have swung at him with his fists, the way he’d learned to deal with most of the world’s indiscretions, but at the time his anger had fizzled into misery instead. Sylvain had been so stupefied by his shoulder-shaking weeping that he’d not only apologized but handed over a battalion of his own to make up for his sticky fingers.

His atonement had been short-lived. As they grew older he borrowed pens and ink pots and books enough to fill a library. At nine, he stole Felix’s position of friend-premiere with Dimitri, having wooed the princeling with his two-year seniority and shooting height. At eleven, three different jackets, even though they were all too short in the sleeve.

It was an endless ledger in which Sylvain was always in the red, and although he made back payments in earnest with his support after Glenn’s death — sitting with him for hours, uncharacteristically quiet, as Felix stared stubbornly at his toes — and with his friendship in turn, there seemed to be nothing that could satisfy his debts entirely.

But the worst of it, without question, came when Felix was twelve, and Sylvain came to him, his face full of one of his million roguish schemes, and asked him to kiss him. There was a girl — one of Ingrid’s distant cousins, Felix understood, with her blonde hair but none of her (well-deserved) apprehension — who was to visit House Gautier, and he was determined to win her heart. He couldn’t manage such a thing if he didn’t know how to kiss her.

Sure, he’d told him, he’d tried it before, but the shy serving girls he’d seduced had never lingered long enough for him to have a proper go at it. Certainly Ingrid would be more likely to break his arm than suffer his request, and that was before she knew he meant to make a target out of her sweet cousin. And it wasn’t like he could ask Dimitri. That might have been treason, for all he knew.

And the worst of _that_ was that Felix had agreed. Not because he was generous — no one would call him that, not even at that age — but because he was greedy. He’d screwed his eyes shut with mock-disgust as Sylvain had sloppily brushed his lips against his own, but it had satisfied a deep and half-hidden part of him that he’d already started to begrudgingly accept.

_So it’s true_, he’d thought absentmindedly that first time while Sylvain grinned with triumph and prattled on about his natural skill. _That_ was why he’d felt like a pin carved into the wrong shape when the daughters of House Fraldarius’ minor lords giggled and peeked at him between their fingers.

It hadn’t bothered him at first. There was his brother, after all, already betrothed and ready to fill in the next bough of their family tree. Maybe he’d be forced to keep it a secret, the way he’d heard it mentioned in discussions before, but everyone had secrets, didn’t they?

So he’d maintained his lessons with Sylvain until there was no question that their skill had become well-honed. Ingrid’s cousin left the north without having fallen victim to his charms, but there were always more. By then Sylvain certainly didn’t need the practice, but Felix suspected he felt as though he’d found a way to scratch an itch and, like many boys that age, wasn’t too terribly concerned about the particulars.

But then Felix’s brother had died. And during a morning that came after, as they sat together on some unremarkable hill covered in frost, Felix had kissed him, and he had seen in Sylvain’s eyes that he understood that they weren’t lessons anymore. He’d stumbled through an apology, his voice already curdled with grief, and that had been the end of that.

Six months later Felix was named a squire. They wrote to one another as they traveled in different directions, but often their letters were bundled with little missives from Ingrid as well. Just the writings of three friends caught up in a rising storm, he realized quickly. He submitted to them with increasingly dry replies.

Maybe if he’d been a more wistful man — if his brother hadn’t been killed, and his father hadn’t lauded his death as if it had been his greatest achievement; if he hadn’t watched the prince turn from a friend into a monster, and known that he was still owed the crown; if he hadn’t felt so damned lonely all of the time — maybe he would have said that Sylvain had stolen his heart. But the truth of it was that he was just a thief who had been picking trinkets from his pockets for years, and that Felix’s affection had been as interesting to him as the blunted swords he’d once forgotten to return.

Still, the sentiment didn’t make his arrival to Garreg Mach any easier to swallow when he’d reunited with them all again.

* * *

Linhardt was watching him. At first it had been unnerving, but now it was simply annoying. He’d heard that the man slept through most everything, but ever since he’d transferred into their house — and with Caspar trailing at his heels — he’d been quite alert. Not that he’d top Dimitri’s eager hand waiving (that insufferable bastard), but he was, without question, awake.

And staring at him.

Incessantly.

Felix cleared his throat and shuffled through the pages of the book spread before him.

“Stop doing that,” Linhardt whispered to him. It nearly made him leap from his seat.

“What the hell are you talking about,” he muttered through the tight grit of his teeth. Linhardt had timed his mockery well. The class lulled into a break with the shuffle of a dozen chairs.

“Looking so miserable all the time,” Linhardt replied with — damn him — a yawn. “It’s exhausting.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? And what are you doing here, anyway? I’m sure your father won’t be thrilled to hear you’ve abandoned your countrymen.” Linhardt rolled his eyes.

“Hannemann is uninspired. Besides, I don’t like Edelgard. She’s so intense, don’t you think?” His eyes darted towards the back of Dimitri’s head. “Well, not that she’s alone in that regard. My theory is that those families have both married far too many brothers to far too many sisters to be entirely... _well-balanced_, let’s say.” He arched his brows at him suggestively.

“Keep your theories to yourself,” Felix growled. “And your treason along with it.”

“That’s quaint of you to say, with all of your ‘boar’-this and that and all the rest.” Linhardt fanned his fingers in the air. Felix wanted nothing more than to escape into the yard, but Byleth had already started to draw up the next lesson on the board.

_Shit._

He bristled under Linhardt’s drowsy stare.

“Anyway, it’s not just for that,” the young man continued on idly. “Or I would have just gone over to the Golden Deer. At least they appreciate the finer points in life. But, alas, your dear professor, in all of his foolishness, chose to preside over you instead.” Felix cocked a brow at him.

“What does that have to do with anything?” He bit his tongue, afterwards, wishing he’d not humored him at all. Linhardt’s face drew into a theatrical frown.

“Well, because I am in love with him, of course. But he says that he would never do such a thing with a student which I, naturally, find quite droll, primarily because he isn’t much of a professor, not having, you know, the qualifications to be called one. And secondly, if the monastery means to have him teach us how to kill one another, it seems far less controversial if he would just sleep with one of us instead.”

Felix’s eyes darted to Caspar in his spot beside his emerald-haired compatriot. He’d heard plenty of gossip that the two of them were far closer than just childhood friends. Caspar was watching him with a half-amused look, his lips drawn into a smirk. Felix wasn’t certain just what that meant at all.

“But,” Linhardt continued with a flick of his hand, “it’s not as if I can force him to do anything. So I will just be doomed to suffer, unrequited.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Caspar finally grumbled.

“Hm,” Linhardt agreed, tipping his head. “And very much able to commiserate.” Felix scowled, knowing, somehow, that suddenly he was talking about him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen,” Linhardt continued, his voice softening into a whisper as Byleth started to speak again. “You’re not stupid. We have before us, no more than three dozen paces from each other, two heirs to the same miserable scratch of land ready to burst into their prime, and a third with a very convenient pedigree and more ambition than perhaps those two idiots combined. I don’t think any of us are going to live particularly long lives. I also don’t intend to be miserable for the time that I do have left.”

“Good for you.” His scowl deepened as Linhardt reached sideways to trace his pinky along the side of his hand. 

“You can call me whatever name you like, you know,” he teased. “Close your eyes, even, although it would be a waste. Between the two of us I’m sure you’d find at least something you like.”

He felt the nape of his neck grow hot, which was perhaps even more mortifying than Linhardt’s offer.

“Shut up,” he snapped, tearing his hand away and leaning as far from him as he could manage. Linhardt shrugged, grinning, before he nestled into the cross of his arms against the desk.

Felix’s eyes darted across the room. Sylvain seemed about as engaged in the lesson as the rest of them. When they’d first started the year they’d sat together, but he’d pilfered so many of Felix’s things — pens, notes, papers — that he’d forced him to go it alone. But of course it hadn’t just been that. It had been his endless chatter as well, and his reckless celebration of conquests of girls without proper names (the “brunette,” “green-eyes,” “that busty one”). He’d punctuate each story by inviting him on his next adventure as if they both knew it wasn’t utterly futile.

_Just stop_, he’d told him, at once lightly and growing in each instance more severe; but he never did, and maybe it wasn’t because he was just clumsy, but because he was cruel.

He looked back at his hands folded against the desktop. They were already criss-crossed with a dozen different scars, and rough from the calluses worn from his work as a squire. _No_, he thought, _he’s right_. They probably wouldn’t live long. Already he’d nearly eclipsed his brother’s lifeline, but how long would his stretch on? He’d seen what Dimitri was capable of, and no matter what he did, at some point he’d bare his teeth again — growing ever closer, in the meantime, to the throne that would grant him absolute dominion over all of them.

So, what of it if he didn’t want to be so fucking miserable all of the time?

He repeated the question to himself later as he hovered at Linhardt’s door. He’d already paced the hallway twice in the hopes of turning back. It was embarrassing. Crude. More than likely it had just been a cruel joke. Well, from anyone else it would have been, at least, but it wasn’t like Linhardt had ever been particularly opaque about his preferences. And maybe that was admirable. Or was he just jealous?

And, gods damn it, what if someone saw him stumbling around out there like a fool?

He knocked on the door. It opened quickly, because of course it did, what with all of his walking about. Linhardt looked amused, but there wasn’t anything bitter in his cat-with-the-cream grin. He led him in with a collegial grip at his shoulder and kissed him without pretense. They found, in the night that followed, that their preferences weren’t so neatly matched — _don’t pout_, Linhardt had teased him, his breath hot and close; _I’ll bring Cas next time_ — but that hadn’t really mattered. And it wasn’t that suddenly he’d forgotten about his red-haired specter, either, but that he’d at least learned that it was a relief not to have to apologize for what he wanted.

Six doors away, as if in another world, Sylvain waited at his friend’s room. He knocked again and frowned, perplexed, at the silence that answered back. That had never happened before. And surely there was something that had been bothering him. He’d been testy all afternoon, even for _him_, and did he really think that he could get away with being miserable all alone?

“Dammit, Felix,” he grumbled, drumming his fingers against his door. He knew from experience that it was impossible to wedge himself into the window of his companion’s room, so it wasn’t as if he had many other options to explore. Still he lingered, his ears pricked and waiting for the shuffle of his steps. Maybe he was asleep. Or maybe he wasn’t. More likely he wasn’t there at all. Sylvain wasn’t quite certain what that meant, but it left him uneasy all the same.


	2. Garden Blooms

Sylvain hadn’t expected Felix to enjoy the ball.

He’d been utterly unsurprised to find him sulking in the corner for the entirety of the event, and he’d equally predicted that he’d do nothing to embellish his usual uniform beyond finally deigning to wear his jacket. What _had_ caught him off guard, however, was hearing him agree to Dimitri’s proposal for a gathering following the dance; and he was positively dumbfounded when the dour swordsman took part — with _vigor_— in the revelry that came after Dimitri’s early retirement.

His unlucky jacket had been lost long before they’d started drinking, but now his vest had been disposed of as well. At some point he’d planted himself in Ingrid’s lap and she, in exchange for sharing a bottle of something strong-smelling with him, had begun to braid his hair. Their intimacy was challenged only by Linhardt and Caspar, the monastery’s worst kept secret, who had sprawled beside them. Linhardt had made a pillow of the second man’s lap and had promptly gone to sleep, although Sylvain — sitting across from them and looking as casually unperturbed as possible — caught him peeking his eyes open more than once when Annette passed around one of their pilfered bottles of wine.

“...and of course Hubert saw the whole thing,” Ingrid chattered on, “so you can imagine what sort of face he was making.” Dorothea, who had been lured in by the sound of their not-so-subtle merrymaking — and, he suspected, was of a mind to follow after the heels of the two compatriots who’d already left her behind — scowled a perfect impression of the dark-haired retainer before spilling into laughter.

“Oh, it’s rotten luck,” the songstress sighed, her voice echoing into the mouth of the wine bottle. “I had to sacrifice a lot to come here, you know, and what sort of hand am I dealt? Those two, already like a snake swallowing its own tail,” she waved the bottle at the former Eagles, “and what I am quite certain is a reaper, and Ferdinand Von Aegir.” Her voice deadpanned with the mention of the last man, which set Annette into a fit of giggles.

“Regrettably, not every man is made for you to eat, Dorrie,” Linhardt drawled, eyes still closed. She flicked her middle finger at him, clearly already quite familiar with his cynicism.

“That isn’t true,” Dorothea contended. “But just that I joined the wrong house, that’s all. Look at you.” She sloshed the bottle in Felix’s direction. Caspar leaned forward to steal it from her. “I’d marry _Hubert_ to become a duchess, but it’d be far easier with you.” Ingrid’s arms looped protectively around Felix’s shoulders, which made them all (most of them, at least) laugh.

“What about me?” Sylvain asked the question out of reflex more than anything, although he did his best to ignore the jealous pinch in his chest as he did. She studied him with a careful eye.

“No,” came her final judgment, to another round of laughter. “You’re too mean for a girl like me.”

“Mean?” He palmed his chest, feigning a convincingly crestfallen tone. “You wound me, madam.” She snorted.

“I know the look of it,” she insisted. That made him frown, although he caught it quickly. He pursed his lips to offer up something witty of his own, but was cut short by Dorothea’s cry as she spotted someone approaching them.

“Claude!” She greeted him happily — perhaps thrilled to have found the biggest fish of the night to lure in — and lurched to her feet to accept his offering of yet another bottle. He came accompanied with a full showing of Deer. Even Marianne followed at his heels, already pink-cheeked and looking somewhat unsteady in her lean against Hilda’s shoulder.

“You seem busy,” the would-be duke offered as he inserted himself — skillfully as ever — into their circle. “And _so_. _Loud_. Don’t you all know anything about doing this sort of thing? Now you’re going to have to share.”

They welcomed him all the same. Sylvain was distracted soon after by a swaggering contest of strength held between himself and the newly arrived archers. While he distinguished himself early by having the greatest reach in jumping at the rafters running outside the classrooms they’d hidden themselves in, he was finally bested by Raphael’s monstrous grip after a long-drawn arm wrestling match.

Starting to feel cotton-headed from the wine, he retreated back to their circle to find that, once bolstered by their late-night arrivals, it had shrunk again. Mercedes, unsurprisingly, was gone, and with Annette no doubt at her side. Linhardt had seemingly retreated to his extended sleeping hours as well. Dorothea too had disappeared — and Claude hadn’t, likely much to her chagrin. Caspar had stayed but, with a light snore slipping from his lips, had become the perfect imitation of his partner.

“I’m going to bed,” Ingrid told him, prescient as always. She clapped her palm against his back. “You should, too. Better for Claude to take the fall if Seteth gets too curious.”

“Alright,” he told her. “Want some help?” She cringed.

“Not in a million years.”

“That isn’t what I — you know, _accompaniment_. No. Wait. Not like that. Just—”

“I don’t need you to walk me to my room, Sylvain,” she interrupted dryly. “Go to bed.” He glanced over to the circle again.

“D’you know where Felix is?”

“No,” she snapped over her shoulder. “_Go_ to _bed_.”

“Fine,” he mumbled, more to himself than anyone else. He meant to say goodbye to the others, but realized that they’d all been replaced by Claude’s golden horde. “Whatever.”

He stumbled out into the gardens. Perhaps that wasn’t the right way. He snorted a laugh. _Whatever,_ he thought again. He’d get there eventually. Ingrid had been right. He just wanted to go to bed. His stupid bed, in his stupid, tiny room, shoved up against Dimitri’s so that he sometimes heard him muttering in there, and hoped that it was Dedue he was talking to, or maybe Ingrid, or a cat, or something other than a ghost.

What he really wanted was to go to Felix’s room, instead, and to nudge his way into his bed the way they’d used to sleep together as snot-nosed kids under a tent before the weather turned too cold. When he’d been nicer, Felix had always told little made-up stories as they huddled together to make them both laugh. After Glenn he hadn’t said that much, really, but that had been alright, too. Even though he looked so icy, his scrawny body had always been warm. And Sylvain was always cold, no matter how many blankets he piled on to his bed, no matter...

He slowed his step at the sound of muffled laughter. It was someone trying to be quiet, which of course made them impossibly loud. Curious, he peeked over a nearby line of hedges and spotted a head of hair that was nearly the same color.

“Aw, fuck,” he muttered.

“Fuck,” Linhardt echoed with a heady moan. “You’re so good at that.”

Sylvain slipped back around the hedge before he was spotted. A part of him broiled with jealousy at the thought that even fucking _Linhardt_ somehow had better luck than him. What kind of Casanova could he be if he wasn’t even _conscious_? Not that it was fair, really; after all, he’d come to the monastery ready-made with his own blushing maiden, or whatever the hell Caspar was.

“Shit.”

That meant that he really had gotten himself lost. Just how long had he been stumbling around if that hot-headed Eagle had already had the time to wake himself and come that far just to suck that lucky bastard’s cock? He rocked backwards on his heels to head back towards the classrooms.

“Gah!” His shoulder collided into something hard. A head, connected to a pair of hands that shoved him back before he tumbled forward.

“What the hell, man,” Caspar sputtered. Sylvain frowned.

“What the hell do you mean, what the hell? You’re the one who ran into me.” He held up his palms at him regardless, not interested in finding himself at the receiving end of the young man’s renowned temper. Caspar glared at him but seemed to agree to his terms.

“Whatever. Have you seen Lin?”

“Who?”

“L-in-har-dt.”

“Er.” His drunken mind ticked slowly. _Shit_. Was he supposed to be loyal to either of them in this sort of situation? Or maybe the better question was, what ending was better suited for him: that he turn Caspar away, and be faced with the threat of being recruited into searching for the narcoleptic-turned-nymphomaniac, or that he lead Caspar straight into his infidelity and be caught as collateral in the ensuing melee?

“I don’t... know?” Caspar scowled at him.

“Okay? Thanks a lot,” he grumbled, shouldering past him to disappear into the shadow of the garden. Sylvain loped forward quickly before he was sucked into his latter prediction.

He’d passed by the lake twice-over before he finally, miraculously, stumbled upon his door. Squinting in an effort to force the lockset to stop spinning, he fumbled with his key. It tumbled from his grip to clink between his toes.

“Come on,” he groaned, lurching forward to hunt it out. He spotted a second pair of boots while he groped along the carpet. “What?”

“What?” Felix parroted the question, sounding as surprised as him and twice as plastered. Sylvain stood slowly, steadying himself against the wall. Even with the space of Dimitri’s door between them, he could see that Felix looked... what was the word? For one, the buttons of his shirt were mismatched and bunched up at the collar, which would have been ridiculous enough if not for the fact that his hair was still half-braided and wild against his shoulders. And if _that_ was what he looked like when he was drunk — his cheeks ruddy and his mouth doing a strange thing that almost made him look _pouty_ — well, it wasn’t...

“What in the hell’ve you been doing?”

“Nothing,” Felix muttered, managing far better with his key. “‘Night.”

“Wait!” Sylvain lurched sideways. “Let me come.”

“What?” Felix glared at him from the door, gripping unsteadily at the doorframe.

“‘S cold,” he answered. Felix looked back at him incredulously. It wasn’t cold. _Fine_. But he felt lonely and he hadn’t liked how Ingrid had been clinging to him all night.

“No,” Felix answered predictably. He watched, with great familiarity, as Felix’s bored scowl flickered into an indecisive frown. He’d gotten better at looking unimpressed, but it wasn’t like Sylvain didn’t know him well enough to see through whatever mask he decided to wear.

“Come on.” The door creaked closed under the press of Felix’s toe.

“No,” he insisted as the latch clicked shut. _What the hell?_

“Felix.” He leaned his brow against the door. “I know you’re just standing there.” He grinned as he heard the sudden scrape of footsteps and the clatter of a chair falling against the floorboards inside. “Come on. I lost my key.”

The door didn’t reply. He hovered there for far too long before he accepted the fact that he’d been ignored.

* * *

“Do you think that Ingrid is sleeping with Felix?” 

Dimitri’s jaw stilled from chewing his forkful of eggs. For a moment he simply stared, bemused, in Sylvain’s direction.

“Sylvain, what sort of question is that?”

“Just a question,” he grumbled bitterly. “Has she said anything to you?”

“I hardly think that it would be appropriate for me to share such information with you, even if she _had_ confided in me about something like that,” Dimitri insisted. Sylvain stabbed glumly at one of the cold yolks piled on his plate and watched it spill along the rim.

“I think it’s fucked up,” he muttered. He wasn’t supposed to use that sort of language around Dimitri, anymore — ordered by his father, and Ingrid, and even Felix to do the same — but his head was pounding and the coffee he’d drunk to settle his stomach had nearly boiled it instead, so to hell with all of that.

“Erm,” Dimitri replied uncomfortably. “If I may be frank with you, you know, you aren’t exactly the one I’d expect to pass on judgment about that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, well, it’s wrong. She’s basically his sister.” One of Dimitri’s neat brows rose. Sylvain meant to rebuke the doubtful look, but was distracted by the sight of the man in question entering into the dining hall himself. He was pleased, at least, to see that Felix looked as miserable as he felt; pale, even for his usual complexion, and with his hair still flat and damp from the baths. Usually he trained in the morning, but Sylvain had the suspicion that his rites had been foresworn that day.

He watched as Felix slunk towards the kitchens and stared haplessly at the breakfast spread. Some time later he made a retreat balancing a singular cup of tea between his fingers. He looked up from the task only briefly, but it was enough to catch Sylvain’s staring. A wounded look bloomed across the man’s face before he turned away.

_Wait. _

Something in his chest pinched tight.

_What the hell was that?_

His eyes dashed between the shapes of his abandoned breakfast as he tried to remember the night before. He hadn’t done anything that unusual, really, had he? Even his flirtations had been unusually benign — thanks in large part to Dorothea, that heartless harpy. He was the one who was supposed to be upset about Felix’s little display with Ingrid, so why in the hell was he giving him that look?

“Sylvain?” Had Dimitri said something? He really wasn’t supposed to ignore him, but — honestly, what the hell? “Are you interested in Ingrid?”

“Eh?” His face screwed into an appropriately sour shape as he turned towards the prince again. “Did you not just listen to what I said?”

“Don’t say it like it’s such a terrible thing,” the prince replied. “Naturally, I think Ingrid would be a wonderful match for any man.”

“Then marry her yourself,” Sylvain snapped as he stood from his place. He was going to catch Felix before he slipped away again. This little game had gone on long enough already. And if Ingrid really thought that she could usurp his position in Felix’s short line of allies, well, she’d better be prepared.

He threaded his way through the dining hall’s sleepy milieu, but was slowed by the sight of two new faces in the crowd. His rising temper settled slightly as he recognized the bristle of Caspar’s hair and Linhardt’s lanky height behind him. Had they already reconciled, then? Or was he about to witness a public execution?

It wasn’t immediately clear. Caspar trailed, yawning, towards the kitchens as Linhardt lingered behind to read over one of the dozen peeling notices plastered on the wall. The mage turned just as another familiar figure approached him with his characteristic cat-like step. Linhardt said something to Felix that made his brows crumple together (annoyed; Sylvain knew that look well), but the swordsman didn’t brush him aside the way he’d expected. He stood, instead, one leg crossed over the other and his toe tapping against the ground as he sipped at the teacup he’d once made to steal. Their conversation wasn’t long, but it ended with Linhardt’s fingers brushing his elbow as he passed him by to leave, and he was quite positive that he’d never seen anyone touch Felix that way without earning themselves a sulking, bitter response. And maybe it had just been a mistake, but that sedated weasel didn’t seem the type to generally fumble about.

“What the hell,” Sylvain echoed, this time aloud, as his eyes slid sideways to settle on Caspar as he piled a greasy tower of sausage links onto his plate. The little brute was bouncing cheerfully on his heels. It almost looked like he was humming.

What the hell was going on?

* * *

“Does that feel good?” 

Linhardt’s half-lidded eyes watched him hungrily. His own slid closed as Caspar shifted his grip around his hips to push him lower against the brace of his forearms. He moaned into the sheets and knew that the wordless sound wouldn’t leave Linhardt satisfied.

That was their game, after all; and, although he no doubt benefitted from it, it was still governed by their rules. They’d snuck into each other’s rooms frequently enough to have become familiar with their roles. At the center of it all was Linhardt’s insatiable appetite for pleasure, to which even the rough-bodied Caspar had submitted long before.

“Yes,” he growled. Linhardt leaned across the creaking mattress to kiss his neck appreciatively. Felix had learned that the mage loved that sort of thing: darting between the two of them as Caspar fucked him to kiss and tease and, most often, simply watch with a dreamy expression that left Felix feeling both unsettled and charmed.

“Nnh,” Caspar groaned, his usual retort. It was better that he was quiet. Felix had learned how to essentially ignore him, which seemed an absurd trick for a man who was so often inside him. Still, he knew the feeling was mutual. As far as they were both concerned, they were simply phantom extensions of the fickle nymph that had brought them together and, for whatever reason, it worked.

But that was what was so dangerous about it, wasn’t it?

He gasped as Caspar tilted his shoulders so that he was turned onto his back. Linhardt leaned over him to kiss the third man — far more passionately, he noted idly, than what he’d ever offered to him.

Not that it mattered.

He closed his eyes again to focus on the warm pleasure flickering at the base of his spine. It _didn’t_ matter. It _did_ feel good. And feeling good, he’d realized, was infinitely better than not. He moaned again as Caspar’s pace quickened. It was, unfortunately, too late to bite it back when a knock rattled against his door.

“Felix?” He froze, his teeth chattering as his eyes darted to the door. Caspar and Linhardt, benevolently, stopped as well. For a wild, desperate moment he’d hoped that he’d just misheard. After all, Dimitri and Sylvain were both meant to be training that evening. It had been the only reason why he’d allowed the duo into his room (and even then, reluctantly).

“Hey, Felix?”

_Fuck_. He clapped his hands over his face. Undeterred, the interloper knocked again.

“It’s me,” Sylvain’s voice insisted. “I know you’re in there. I can see the light.” He peeked between his fingers at the offending oil lamp across the room. _Fuck, fuck, fuck_.

“It’s night,” he croaked lamely, wincing at the sound.

“I know it’s night,” his friend replied, his sardonic tone clear even through the door. “I just want to talk for a second. It won’t take long.”

“I’m sleeping.” He caught the devious glint in Linhardt’s eye too late. _No, no_. He grabbed at his shaggy hair but already he’d bowed forward to take him in his mouth.

“You’re not sleeping,” Sylvain continued grumpily. “I told you, I can see your lamplight.”

“Ah...” He clamped his thighs around Caspar’s shoulders to hold him steady before he had the clever idea to start moving, too. The shift nearly pushed Linhardt sideways as well, but he was persistent. _Fucking bastards_. “I... Tomorrow, Sylvain. Alright?”

“Felix.”

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yes!” His too-eager affirmation coincided with the quick dipping of Linhardt’s jaw. He pawed uselessly at his brow, knowing that somehow he probably found this to be the most thrilling aspect of their night.

“...Alright. Tomorrow.” He could see the shadow of his legs sneaking through the space beneath his door. It lingered for too long before finally turning away.

“Honestly,” Linhardt sighed into the skin of his belly. “What a waste of time.”

“Shut up. What the hell was that?”

“Oh, come on,” Linhardt cooed. “I always repay my debts.” Caspar pushed his legs away to carry on, just like some sort of choreograph that had been jerkily delayed. Felix flinched as Linhardt settled beside him, his elbow cocked beneath his chin.

“We’re rare birds in a place like this,” he drawled, twirling a damp strand of Felix’s dark hair around his finger. “But only here. You don’t need to chain yourself to him, you know.” Felix stared into the ceiling and tried to tune him out. “He doesn’t love you.”

“Neither do you,” Felix bit back. Linhardt smiled and kissed him.

“No, I don’t,” he replied, sounding a little sad.

Felix rolled his eyes and did his best to pretend it didn’t bother him. 


	3. Black and Blue

Sylvain had been in a bitter mood all morning. The horses seemed to sense it, too. Maybe that was why he’d been relegated to the stables to begin with. He’d always had a suspicion that the professor used monastery duties as a means to quietly dispose of his more troublesome students-du-jour. 

And, so, yes, today it might have been him, but for a very good reason.

The fact was that Felix was not a friendly person. He never started a conversation of his own volition unless it was to challenge someone to a duel; and, even then, he’d never managed the nuance of a gentlemanly match. For a duke’s heir he’d never been one for camaraderie, let alone political alliance. But he was his friend, and had been since he’d been a far more charming little boy, and even if he’d become rather difficult in his young adulthood, Sylvain had never doubted his standing.

But Felix had never hidden from him, either, and he’d never looked at him the way he had in the dining hall.

Well.

That wasn’t true. He had once before. But that had been different. As far as he was aware, no one had died from their sloppy revelry following the ball, so what the hell had that look been for?

“Sylvain. You’ve been raking the same spot since I first got here.” His heart sunk into a miserable puddle in his gut. Ingrid looked on, unmoved. “Come on. I’m not going to do all of this by myself.”

And Ingrid. _Ingrid_? Of course, he cared about Ingrid — not as much as Felix, maybe, but more than the rest. She was brave, and good on a horse, and had been dealt just as cruel a hand as the rest of them. But that didn’t mean that she deserved him the way he’d been that night — laughing along with the rest of them as Caspar and Ashe traded jokes, and leaning into the touch of her braiding fingers as if it’d been an afterthought — especially not after he’d been squirming away from Sylvain for years.

“Hey. Are you listening to me?” She snatched the rake from his fingers. The grumpy look shadowing her face faded as she stared up into his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yes,” he muttered distractedly, running a hand through his hair.

“Do you really think you can lie to me like that? I’m not one of your girls, you know. I’ve never found you particularly difficult to read.” He frowned. She was right, of course — those green eyes of hers were deadly. He scrubbed his fingers across his face and sighed.

“No, it’s... So, well... Are you,” he mumbled, suddenly self conscious. “Are you and Felix, you know, together?”

“What?” She pivoted onto her toes to grab him by the shoulders. His brow furrowed as she studied him, her nose almost brushing his own. “I know that you aren’t stupid, Sylvain. Why are you asking me stupid questions?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” He shrugged from her grip and crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re serious?” Her voice dipped into a dry tone. “You _seriously_ think that I’m in a relationship with Felix?” He frowned, his temper sparking. It seemed that it was easy for all of them to mock him, lately, but that didn’t mean that he liked it.

“It’s not like you’ve been discreet!”

“Oh, my gods,” Ingrid sighed, rubbing her temples. “What is wrong with you? Honestly? Are you _that_ self-involved, that you...” She tossed her hands into the air with a frustrated sound. “I _know_ that you already know this, Sylvain. He’s _told_ me that you do.”

“Know what?”

“Felix isn’t interested in women, you idiot.”

“That...that doesn’t matter.”

“_What_?”

He rolled his eyes, suddenly exhausted with the conversation. She wouldn’t understand. For all of the harassment Ingrid had to face regarding her own marriage eligibility, she didn’t have a title, at least not like theirs. And Felix was the worst-cursed of all of them, what with his dukedom lurking at his heels. It was the sort of thing that didn’t allow one much discretion with regards to something as frivolous as preference, especially when that _preference_ meant a stubbed succession line.

“Hey,” she continued, undeterred even as he turned to storm out of the barn. “You can’t be such an asshole about this! He’s your friend, you know?”

“Of course he is!”

“So don’t just... Invalidate him like that!”

“_Invalidate_? What the hell are you talking about?”

“_Sylvain_.”

“You don’t know him,” he insisted sourly. “None of you do. Not like I do. Don’t act like you do.”

“He’s my friend, too!” Her fingers balled into fists at her side. “I was there, too! For all of it! So don’t you act like you’re both off fighting a war that I know nothing about!” She snatched at his sleeve. “You...” she continued, her voice wavering. “You’re dangerous, you know? You’ve always been hoarding him away, and it’s always just been for you.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he snarled back venomously. He ripped his wrist free and stalked further into the yard.

“Sylvain! Where are you going?”

“Don’t follow me!” There was something in his tone that made her pause.

“Dammit! Sylvain!”

He shouldn’t have spoken to her like that. Even he knew that. But he knew something else, now, too. As he’d argued with her, a prickling realization had wormed its way through his mind. Once she’d started berating him he’d known that she was being honest, but that didn’t mean that Felix hadn’t been snatched away by someone else. His only mistake had been in thinking that it was her.

But it was obvious, wasn’t it? Only that he’d been too blind to see it until it’d nearly been dangled in front of his face.

His riled nerves crackled as he stormed towards the library. It was an odd hour to be there, trapped between the first morning sessions and the lunchtime lull. He wasn’t surprised to find it empty save for the very person he was hunting out.

“Linhardt.” The named man looked up slowly from his book. Spotting Sylvain at the doorway, he rolled his eyes and groaned.

“No, thank you. I’m not interested,” he insisted tritely, his eyes dropping to the text again. It did little to steady Sylvain’s temper. He stomped forward, fanning his fingers across the book’s pages to tug it from Linhardt’s hands.

“Whatever you’re doing with Felix, I want you to stop.” Linhardt stared up at him from beneath his lashes.

“Hm,” he answered. “No.” Sylvain’s jaw gritted tight.

“End it, or I’ll tell Caspar that you’re fucking around.”

“Will you, now? I hardly think that he will be surprised, him being responsible for the fucking.”

“What?” His eyes narrowed as Linhardt slipped his fingers on top of his.

“I don’t know what it is you think you’ll be able to offer him. I doubt you know the first thing about what he likes. I mean, you have big hands,” he teased, drawing his fingertips along his knuckles, “but Cas has a big cock. I’ve never been so fond of compromise, myself.” He flinched, wrenching himself free to snatch at Linhardt’s collar instead.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Linhardt cocked his chin, looking rather unimpressed.

“You really are as stupid as they say you are, aren’t you?” Sylvain didn’t have the chance to reply. He yelped out in surprise, instead, as a steely grip ripped him back by the nape of his jacket.

* * *

Felix had been reading the same sentence for hours. Each time he settled on it the letters began to blur. His thoughts were just as capricious, tumbling from annoyance to concern and tip-toeing into something more miserable as he watched the sun dip lower towards the horizon. Sylvain had been so desperate to speak to him, before. So where the hell _was_ he? 

And what was so important to have made him that desperate to begin with? Felixstarted to scribble a furious black dot in the margins of his book. And why had he been watching him so much lately, like a cat after a mouse?

Did he know?

Well, he must have known.

What else could it be?

No, that was ridiculous. Even Ingrid hadn’t known, and Ingrid knew everything.

More likely he had heard something upsetting from his father. The Margrave was like that — little he did wasn’t upsetting. And it hadn’t been so long since Miklan... well, it hadn’t been that long since that had happened, either.

His pen swooped deeper across the page.

_Shit_. All of that, and he’d been hiding from him just because... Why? Because he was embarrassed that he’d become the plaything of the monastery’s most understatedly lascivious resident?

Well, that wasn’t all of it, of course. But that old longing of his was just that: old. And although it had become a proper hydra in his chest, growing a hundred new biting heads each time he tried to cut himself free, he’d become familiar enough with it to generally ignore it.

In any case, all of that hardly seemed to matter if Sylvain was actually _upset_.

He nearly tumbled from his chair with relief when he finally heard a timid knock at his door.

“Sylvain?” No answer, although he could see the dark spots of his boots from across the room. “Come on, then. It’s unlocked.” The door creaked slowly open. He quickly understood his hesitation.

_For the love of... _

“What the fuck did you do to your face?”

“Nothing,” Sylvain insisted under his breath even as he covered his blackened eye with the bend of his hand. His collar was ripped as well and was drooping crookedly across his shoulder. He sat at Felix’s feet before he had the chance to berate him.

“You look like shit,” he told him dryly. His heart — already lurching — beat faster as Sylvain suddenly leaned forward to rest his chin against his thigh.

“I got into a fight,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Felix answered, clinging desperately to his wry tone.

“I lost.”

“I mean, obviously.”

“I got in a fight with Caspar.”

“What? _Why_?” His chest grew tight as he glanced up at him.

“Don’t sleep with him anymore.” He felt the color drain from his face. In that moment he wanted nothing more than to kick Sylvain from his lap, but there was something in his eyes — blackened or otherwise — that had petrified him in place.

“Him and Linhardt,” Sylvain continued glumly. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t—”

“Something’s happening. I know you must’ve noticed it by now, too. The Black Eagles — even for Edelgard, they’re... off.”

“What?” Felix barked the question at him, thoroughly lost and nearly deafened by the heartbeat thundering in his ears.

“I don’t want you to get sucked into it.”

“Sylvain,” he stammered, “I...” And why was it that the sound of Edelgard’s name had made that sore spot open in his chest? He sucked in a breath. “None of that has anything to do with me.”

Sylvain wrapped his arms around his leg. He hated that. Hated that he’d always pawed at him so casually, as if he’d just been another one of his long limbs. And he despised that look in his amber eyes, now, glowering just like a little boy begging for a toy.

“I don’t like it.”

Felix bucked his head back against his shoulders and stared hotly at the ceiling. _For fuck’s sake_. Of course he didn’t. He never did. It was the reason why Sylvain had always ridden the fastest horse, even when they took their mounts from the duchy stables; why he ate the sweetest apples picked from the Gautier orchards while Felix choked down bitter ones. He always got what he wanted, even when he didn’t ask for it.

But would it really be so hard for him to lie? To say that there was something tender, there, for once, that had roused his avarice awake? Even Caspar had learned the ways not to hurt him when he took from him, so what was it about Sylvain that made that so impossible?

“..._Fine_,” Felix replied tightly, because he didn’t have the choice, and he wasn’t naive enough to think that he ever had. He heard Sylvain sigh as he tilted his cheek against his thigh. The look of his relief made something deep and aching well up inside Felix’s chest.

It was an old, familiar feeling. When he’d been young it had been his constant companion. Every bump and bruise and inconvenience had once, and much to his father’s consternation, brought him to tears. After Glenn had died he’d though he’d exhausted his supply, like a well that had been drawn dry. But there it was again. He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed quickly at his eyes before wagging his leg from side to side to knock Sylvain free.

“Alright. Enough. Let me see your face.”

And so he chased away Sylvain’s swelling bruise — to Sylvain’s amusement, no doubt enthralled by the idea that Felix had humored Byleth’s white magic lesson plans — and submitted himself to the man’s idle chatter about some sort of arm wrestling match he’d had with the Golden Deer, and he ignored the strange vacuum left behind by the topic they’d so clumsily danced around before.

He felt his chest ache again later as Sylvain begged to stay the night — using his inane old argument about his being cold (and no matter the fact that somehow it always seemed to be true, with his fingers always the temperature of ice no matter the weather) — and had to hide the croak of his voice when he agreed.

But it was better to feel good instead of bad, a little voice inside him insisted as they squeezed into his narrow bed. That was right, wasn’t it? And it felt good when Sylvain slung hisarm over his waist to hug him against his chest, even if he did it in his sleep. Even if he knew Sylvain was only there as a guard dog against the threat of Caspar and Linhardt’s return. Even if he knew that he was just another toy soldier for Sylvain to toss into his box of prizes before forgetting about him again.

No.

It wasn’t good.

It hurt.

He hated it — and everything about Sylvain, except for Sylvain himself. He grit his teeth as the man in question shifted in his sleep, his drowsy breath hot against his nape. And he might have been a fool, but he wasn’t a coward, or at least he didn’t want to be one for much longer.

Staring into the unremarkable shape of the wall, Felix decided that he’d face the truth with Sylvain in the morning. He’d tell him that he loved him — and, when Sylvain sidestepped it, the way he’d done at least once before, he’d insist that it was the type of love that was full of hunger and hot blood. And if that spooked him off then maybe it was better. He might not have had a second love to cling to if were to come to that, but at least they could stop this endless, exhausting dance. Even being alone was better than this.

As it happened, however, Sylvain had been right. It wasn’t a surprise. If anyone would have known it would have been him, with those sharp eyes of his hidden under his well-crafted fool’s mask. Felix had nearly worked up the nerve to speak with him by the time they’d made their way to their morning lessons, only for them to be greeted by a room filled with fear.

_Edelgard’s gone_, Ingrid told them, her face difficult to read. _She’s named herself empress_. Confused, he’d looked to Dimitri next and had been horrified to see that he’d already become the thing he’d always feared he’d turn into. So that was it, was it? _I don’t think any of us are going to live particularly long lives_, Linhardt had said. And now Edelgard had come to collect on his promise.

Suddenly the dark water of that well inside his chest hadn’t mattered any longer. Or maybe it was just that it had started to overflow. Now they were all caught in it, but it wasn’t his boyhood heartbreak any longer. It was, instead, the thing that had been truly haunting him for years: death, once wearing his brother’s face, this time violet-eyed. 


	4. Sleeping with Ghosts

Everything was fucked. 

That wasn’t the word they used, of course. Tenuous, yes, and difficult; dire, critical, unprecedented. But those kinds of words were meant for history lessons, not for what he’d seen — villages burning and limbless boys left to rot in the fields their fathers had once tilled. His country was falling and, if the messy-scrawled message he’d crumpled in his palm was true, now it was well and truly fucked.

Sylvain nudged his nervous destrier across a muddy pit. At first, when they’d all scattered from the monastery after the imperial troops had left it desecrated, he’d been sickened by the spreading violence that had started to lay Faerghus bare. Now the bald-burned forests and ruined fields had become familiar to him. His horse was still spooked by the smoke and blood in the air, but to him the scent had lost its smell entirely.

The hinterlands of Gautier, luckily, had so far been overlooked. The weather had started to turn, and he knew that both the imperial army and the kingdom’s own traitors were not so eager to suffer through a northern march just to conquer a few frozen cities. But with spring they would, there was no question; and not Gautier, perhaps, or at least not first, but certainly Fraldarius, with its buzzing ports pointed towards a potential alliance with Leicester. Perhaps even more tantalizing was Duke Rodrigue himself, still steadfast in his support of the Blaiddyd throne even as his compatriots began to bow beneath Edelgard’s grinding heel.

He hadn’t seen the Duke for months, but he’d seen his son. The war had already changed Felix — or maybe it was just that under its relentless grip he’d finally bloomed into whatever it was that he’d always been training for. Sylvain had spoken to him a half-dozen times since they’d left the monastery — and them both exhausted, clapping their palms limply against each other’s shoulders to show that they were thankful that they were both still alive, but without the spirit left to say anything more worthwhile — but more often he simply saw him afield, his blade flashing as he cut through the empire’s men with an unnerving accuracy.

The swordsman was always too far forward. Surely he had been chided for it. He wasn’tsome frontline infantryman, after all, but an heir challenged in prominence perhaps only by the throne itself. They may not have formally graduated from Garreg Mach, but he was, for all intents and purposes, an officer, fully trained; but still he fought alongside the roughest hewn of his father’s men, and they loved him for it.

As Sylvain rode to seek him out now he smirked, wondering just how annoyed Felix must have been by the way the soldiers were already talking about him like he was some knight torn from the pages of their boyhood books. Sure, he was a little cold, they’d admit as they draped their bedrolls across the fields they’d fought in the day before; but he was brave, the bloody bastard, and probably a bit mad — just what a war called for.

Of course, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

Sylvain had inspired no stories about his own efforts, himself. He was cautious and deliberate in how he fought, even if his reservation may have surprised the allies who had once been his classmates; but he certainly didn’t want to die, at least not that early, and, damn it, he’d made Felix promise the same, so what the _hell_ was he thinking?

And now... How would Felix fight, now that that grim message had been sent from the capital contending that Dimitri had killed his own uncle and had been sentenced to hang for the crime? Word traveled slowly across the broken kingdom, now, and worse when it was handed furtively between the loyalists’ thinning ranks. By now poor Rufus was already cold in the ground, and that could only mean that Dimitri was, too.

Sylvain pulled the helm of his dark armor from his head as he spotted a pair of familiar banners in the distance. They were further south than he had anticipated. He slowed his pace and waved benignly in a scout’s direction as he came upon the camp.

“Who d’you fight for?” One of the men at the fore asked him the question hoarsely, his face scarred beneath a mail cap. It was a good question, really.

“The rightful king,” he answered. “Is Duke Rodrigue here?”

“No.” Sylvain’s stomach sunk as he eyed the guard’s stony grimace. _Not much of a conversationalist, was he?_

“Where has he gone?”

“He’s not here.” Sylvain fought the urge to roll his eyes. Fhirdiad, he imagined, and even if it were an unreasonably dangerous idea. He couldn’t imagine the Duke would leave Dimitri to his fate alone even if he had, by some impossible margin, been responsible for his uncle’s death. 

“And Felix?” The guard’s brow furrowed, but he offered him no further reply. _For fuck’s sake_, he thought dryly to himself as he sidled past the man. For two houses so closely and historically aligned, the sentiment hadn’t seemed to have been passed down the rank. At least he was not beaten back as he trailed into the camp.

It wasn’t as if he’d really needed an answer. He’d always been exceptionally skilled at hunting Felix out. Seeing that he wasn’t among the officers’ tents in the heart of the encampment, he lashed his horse to a crowded post and walked towards the fields beyond the camp’s bustle.

It had been a village, once, he realized as he trudged through the camp’s outskirts. Some of the fields were still intact, apparently now clumsily looked after by the soldiers themselves. Most of them, however, had been trampled and burned. Most of the houses, too, had lost their thatch to fire. It was an eerie graveyard to the people who must have once lived there.

He scanned the ruins carefully. His eyes settled on a little hill overlooking the square. _There_, he thought, and he was right. He trudged up the back of the mound to find Felix laid neatly at its crest, eyes closed, his arms folded over his chest as if he were being prepared for burial himself. Sylvain crept toward him quietly, for some reason unsettled by the sight.

“Do you plan on saying something?” Felix asked him the question after perhaps too long, his eyes still closed and his chest rising with the same slow metronome.

“Hey, Felix,” Sylvain managed as he sat at his side. They fell into another silent lull. He hated it. It wasn’t as if it was a new feature for Felix, always so stubbornly taciturn, but Sylvain had never found it so difficult to talk to him before. He wasn’t sure just what it was that had built that wall between them. Of course, there were plenty of reasons to chose from, just that he didn’t want to face the task of sorting through them.

“You’ve heard the news?” It was Felix who finally broached the subject. Sylvain frowned, pulling the scrap of paper from his sleeve to read again. He folded and unfolded the parchment a half-dozen times.

“Do you think it’s true?” Felix finally opened his eyes and turned to look in his direction. He looked tired.

“Dimitri has been dead for years,” he replied quietly. It filled Sylvain’s chest with pinpricks. _Don’t say that_, he wanted to cry out, the needles turning into the first embers of hurt anger. _He was our friend, Felix. Don’t you remember?_

“What are you going to do?” He asked the question instead, and by _you_, as he often had before, he, of course, meant _we_. Felix stared into the dark clouds gathering over their heads.

“I don’t know.”

“You... you’re too reckless, Felix,” Sylvain continued, before he could catch himself. “The way that you’ve been fighting, you’re going to get yourself killed.” Felix kept staring, said nothing back. Sylvain could smell rain in the air. It was stupid for them to be out there. It was just warm enough for it to not freeze into snow, but that didn’t mean that it would be pleasant to find themselves drenched.

“You promised me, you know,” he added bitterly, surprising even himself as the words continued to tumble between his lips. “You can’t just die, too.”

The first icy drop of rain dripped down the collar of his coat just as Felix looked to him again. That look of resignation that had clouded his eyes before was gone, replaced by a haunted and harrowed stare that made his voice die in his throat.

Felix stood without a word, flicking the hood of his cloak over his head as the rain started to fall.

“Come on,” he told him tightly as he began to trail down the hill. Sylvain followed at his heels, cowering beneath the crook of his arm as the shower grew thicker. By the time they’d made it to the base of the hill they were both already soaked to the bone.

“There,” he insisted, catching Felix at the elbow to turn him towards one of the huts still covered with a roof. There was no point in trudging back to the camp now, especially if all it had to offer was leaking tents and hundreds of tired soldiers thrown into a bitter mood. Maybe Felix made an annoyed face at his proposal, but he couldn’t see it through the grey curtain of the rain. Thankfully, the door opened without resistance.

It was a proud home; two storied, and with a heavy table at its heart still half-set with piecemeal dishes and a withered bouquet. Felix drifted to the hearth without a word, snatching a chair as he did to break into kindling with three loud smacks against the hard-packed floor. Sylvain worked the clasps of his armor loose while he worked, already shivering from the damp doublet underneath.

“I’ll see if I can find something dry,” he told Felix as the man hunched over his task of starting a fire. Felix grunted an affirmative sound in reply. Sylvain shook his head at his unflappable moodiness while he strode up the stairs, his fingers still fiddling with the straps of his vambraces. The second story was more grim than the first, filled with strewn clothes and shattered glass and all of the telltale signs of having been ransacked. He ignored a dark stain in the corner as he stripped a pair of beds clean of their blankets.

He returned downstairs to find a fire crackling in the hearth. Felix hovered before it, his pale fingers outstretched above the flames. He’d shrugged the soggy cloak from his shoulders but had otherwise lingered in his bedraggled clothes. 

“Here,” Sylvain said as he offered a blanket to him. He took it without looking at him, his eyes still settled on the fire. Sylvain stepped back to kick his boots from his feet. He’d finished with the buttons of his doublet before he noticed that Felix hadn’t moved from his spot.

“You’re going to catch a fever,” he chided him. “Come on.” Maybe he would have teased him about his newfound modesty, too, if they hadn’t been standing in the house of the dead. Still, his boyish glare was enough to make Sylvain grin. Felix relented stubbornly and slowly, his hands (trembling with the cold, Sylvain noted, bemused) working the buttons of his coat loose.

Sylvain focused on his own task of undressing until he noticed that the man had shifted himself into a strange pose. If he was truly going to be such a child about it he would have expected him to keep his back to him as he undressed; but instead he’d sidled to the side, and with his chin nearly against his shoulder as he did his best to look anywhere but towards him. What the hell was he doing?

_Hiding_, Sylvain realized with his next breath. He was hiding something from him. He cocked his head slowly to the side, feigning a stumble with his pant leg so that he didn’t spook him. The lines of his pale back gradually revealed themselves to him — and there, stretching the full length of his spine, was a gnarled scar, deep-gouged.

“Fuck, Felix,” Sylvain breathed. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have a few scars of his own — notably the star-shaped thing at his shoulder from an arrow that had found a lucky space between the plates of his armor — but nothing like that. He padded towards him before he had the chance to retreat. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Felix spat defensively. He flinched as Sylvain’s fingers traced the dark tissue. “Just some idiot with a lance. Don’t touch it. It was better that he did that than run me through.”

His chest filled with something smoldering as he imagined the imperial fucker that Felix had described, running him down like a coward. And where had Sylvain been? Not just for whatever battle it had been, but in what came afterwards? _Fuck_. He shut his eyes as a dizzy rush swirled inside his head. Felix tried to step away as he gripped his arms, but he held him fast.

“What are you doing?” He ignored him to press his lips against the knotted skin. “Stop it.” His lips trailed higher, following along the divot of his spine until they brushed against the wet hair bunched at his nape. “Fucking stop!” Felix wrenched one of his arms free to shove his shoulder between them.

“Why are you always hiding from me?”

Felix’s doggish snarl faltered at his words. His brows bunched into a wounded expression just as Sylvain leaned forward to kiss him. _Don’t run_, he begged him, his hands slipping from his arms to cup the tangle of his hair. _Stop leaving me behind_.

A dripping heat filled the low parts of his stomach as he felt him relent. His mouth was hot; made him forget the painful chill creeping through his bones. Sylvain’s breath hitched as he felt the grip of his fingers against his shoulders — not pushing at him but pulling him in. _Yes_, a deep part of him cried out, _more_. _Give me_.

Felix gasped as he nudged him to the floor and set to work on peeling the slacks from his legs. Sylvain kept his eyes steady on his face, hungry for the look that had spilled across it. It was not full of his usual bland disinterest but rather something unshielded and nearly desperate. He nearly moaned himself as he felt his long fingers working his own laces loose. 

“Wait,” Felix insisted huskily once he’d lost his patience and pushed himself between his legs. “You can’t just... stop, hold on.” He watched, flustered, as Felix snaked his arm between the crush of their bodies to slip two of his fingers between his lips. He drew them downwards afterwards to press inside himself.

“Stop,” Felix snapped again, his cheeks darkening into an irresistible color as he caught his bewitched stare.

“No,” Sylvain answered, although he did break his gaze to lean forward and kiss his throat. “You look so fucking good.”

Perhaps he wasn’t as deft as Felix was with these sorts of things, but there were less enigmatic parts of him to explore as well. Sylvain palmed his hand between them, reveling in the way that Felix’s brows tightened and twitched as he touched him. It soon proved to be too much for his thin-spread restraint.

“Please,” he breathed into his ear. _Give me, give me_. His blood thudded in his ears as he felt Felix’s arm shift away beneath him. He pushed his knee between his legs and followed after with his desire. That broke away the last pieces of Felix’s old mask. What was left in its place — pink-cheeked and wincing, gasping — made him feel dizzy again.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” The fact that he had lied only made him hungrier still. He bowed forward to kiss the thin skin at the corner of his eyes, his mouth watering from the salt of the tears that had gathered there. _Mine_, a voice inside him insisted with a steady chant, the rest of his thoughts broken into meaningless pieces long before.

“You look so good,” he told him again as he kissed him. “Don’t show anyone else.” Felix’s fingers drug along his back. They were strong, just like the rest of him. He’d always bested him in a fight. This was the only way, Sylvain realized; the only arena in which he would ever submit to him. The thought thrilled him, like a lion-tamer taunting his sharp-toothed charge.

“No one but me,” he continued as a delicious tension filled him. Felix’s fingers snaked into his hair and pushed him forward so that he was kissing him again.

“Sylvain,” he gasped, his breath hot against his lips.Not just his breath, but everything, everything, and finally. It had been so long since Sylvain had felt anything but cold.

Outside, a world apart, the rain shivered into hail. It clattered against the old rafters of the house, setting a tempo for their ragged gasping that only the ghosts could hear.


	5. Old and Familiar Places

“Honestly, Felix.”

He ignored him. It wasn’t difficult. He’d been doing it for years. Still, a part of him was selfishly pleased that his newest battle’s worth of scrapes had worried him.

“It’s fine,” Felix replied, careful to keep that pebbly tone of his so that he didn’t sound too earnest. He wasn’t quite sure what Sylvain would do if he were to make a mistake like that: think that his wounds were more serious than they were, most likely, as if the only way he could possibly speak gently to him would be because he’d struck his head.

Well. It wasn’t Sylvain’s fault, really. Felix had been the one to paint himself with the colors of a bitter man so many years before, after all, and he’d been so adept at it that even Sylvain had been fooled. Nothing — not even the intimacy that had bloomed between them, both intoxicating and infuriating — could change that now.

“Stop it,” he continued as Sylvain turned his arm to hunt out the slash that had left his sleeve bloodied and torn. “Luella can handle it.” Sylvain cast him an incredulous look.

“Luella’s a day’s ride away,” he contended. “If not two. That’s plenty of time for this thing to fall off in the meantime.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works, Sylvain.”

Felix winced as he snatched his arm back from Sylvain’s (admittedly gentle) fingers. He turned it to make his own inspection, intending to accentuate his point, and felt his stomach lurch instead as he spotted pale bone. _Well, fuck_. But better that Luella, a sweet-natured mage from Conand who had rallied to his father’s banners, manage it than Sylvain. He wasn’t even certain if the cavalier could cast anything more sophisticated than the occasional spark used to annoy him when he wasn’t paying him adequate attention.

“You look better with two arms,” Sylvain argued. Felix rolled his eyes.

“Just help me wrap it and let’s get on with it, alright?”

Sylvain frowned but relented, turning to hunt out the appropriate supplies from his saddlebags. Felix’s eyes drifted across the frozen wood as he worked. They were in Charon, and far further south than they’d first intended when his father had banded what was left of the kingdom’s loyalists together to push the imperial army west. The effort, unsurprisingly, had proven far more difficult than they’d hoped.

At least they’d been together, he thought, his eyes drifting to Sylvain again as he watched him juggle a roll of gauze and a handful of mealy apples that had gotten in the way. Not that he would tell him that. If it had been up to Sylvain, he suspected that they would have both fled to some distant land long ago in the name of self preservation. And, while they still fought separately more often than together, when they did share a field he would hover around him so protectively that he nearly trampled him underfoot.

Still. It was nice to have someone who wanted to protect him, even if his methods were a bit preposterous. And, although he’d hardly let him in on the secret, the only reason that he’d found an imperial axehead sheering at his forearm to begin with was because it had been aimed in Sylvain’s direction.

“Can’t you do anything about it?” Sylvain asked him the question as he rounded on him again, sloshing a flask invitingly as he did.

“No. I can manage small things, but not — are you trying to get me drunk?”

“Maybe.” Sylvain smiled. The expression did not have its intended affect. He looked so exhausted, Felix thought, his stomach sinking. His jaw was bruised from a misplaced blow and nearly matched the color of the dark shapes circling his eyes. Between their southward march and the Empire’s relentless offensive, they hadn’t had much opportunity to sleep. And even when they did, they did so with one eye open, tense and waiting for all of the things hunting them out.

“I read that it helps,” Sylvain continued matter-of-factly. “On the cut, not in your mouth.”

“You _read_?” He cocked a brow at him, unconvinced. Sylvain laughed.

“Well, someone read it, and then they told it to me, as anyone would, given my irresistible charm. Still, you might want to drink some before I pour it on — no doubt it hurts even if it’s not swill like this.” Felix rolled his eyes.

“Just get on with it,” he ordered him, pricking his sleeve with his sword to cut away its shredded lower half. He heard Sylvain suck in a breath as he did but chose to ignore that, too. The taller man splashed a glug of water from his canteen first to wash away the grime. Felix bit back a grunt, but was less successful as Sylvain followed it with a fiery pour from the flask.

“_Fucking_,” Felix managed before hissing a string of meaningless sounds.

“Stop,” Sylvain insisted, suddenly serious as he held him fast. Felix flinched as he began to wind a thick band of gauze around his arm. “That’s not good enough,” he chided him as they both watched the white bandage darken.

“It’s fine.” Felix flexed his fingers before batting Sylvain’s own hands away. “It’s _fine_, Sylvain. Thank you.” Those last two words dissolved the stubborn look on the man’s face. _We don’t have a better option_ is what they’d really meant, and they both knew it to be true. 

It was a good summary of everything that had happened in the years following the coup. Even at its start the war had been unbalanced. Now most of the old houses were gone, lost to treachery and cowardice and violence for those who had stood fast. Sometimes Felix wondered if they were still fighting simply because they’d forgotten how to do anything else.

“Alright.” Sylvain turned. “Let’s find some place to rest.”

They marched forward into the wood. The ground was too choked with roots to manage it neatly astride Sylvain’s destrier — and, moreover, the poor beast was so exhausted itself that Felix wasn’t certain if it could suffer a rider. All three of them picked through the gloom clumsily, silent except for the clatter of Sylvain’s armor and the horse’s huffing breath.

It had started to grow dark, but not as dark as the shadows that had begun to linger at the corner of his eyes. He should have told him, maybe, but what difference would that make? The truth was, he wasn’t convinced that Luella — or any of the soldiers she’d accompanied — was even alive. He and Sylvain had been lucky to have been swallowed up and tossed off course by the Empire’s rear guard, but the rest of them had been trapped next to its biting head. And he couldn’t heal himself, and Sylvain certainly couldn’t, no matter how much liquor he’d squirreled away, so why waste the breath?

And yet his fingers had grown sticky with blood again, and now he couldn’t hear the crunch of his footfalls. _Just tired_, he told himself, staggering forward. That was a good word for everything, too. He was so _tired_ of being tired, of living in a body with muscles that were always tensed, of eating tasteless things that left him feeling half-sick. Maybe it would be better to stop. Not forever, fine, but just for a moment — to curl up in the gnarled lap of one of those leafless trees and just close his eyes. It was cold, but that had never bothered him before.

“Felix.” So he’d noticed that he’d lagged behind. Felix focused on the press of his lips in their fine line. _I’m fine_, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t force them open. Sylvain stopped.

“Let me...” His offer died midstream. For a half moment Felix wondered what he’d meant to say — _carry you_? But how, with him stumbling himself? _Bury you_ might have been closer to the truth, and better him than anyone else. He didn’t have the chance to learn the truth of it, his eyes instead darting over his shoulder as something crunched in the underbrush.

Felix sucked in a sharp breath and drew his sword. At least that imperial had been generous enough not to aim for his dominant hand. He heard Sylvain pull his lance from where he’d lashed it against his saddle. It was an old reflex, now: arming themselves, sinking into the right stance, eyes wild as they looked for the right places to cut.

He could smell the ozone of someone preparing a spell. _Fuck_. That wouldn’t be as easy, particularly not if they meant to burn the forest down as well. He shared a quick glance with Sylvain and saw that he had noticed, too. There was a resolute look in his face that didn’t suit him.

He didn’t have the time to study it for long. A ghostly flame had gathered between the tree trunks ahead of them. Sylvain dashed forward without a sound, his lance already leveled and deadly. Felix slipped after him, frustrated that he’d gotten the jump on him. His vision lurched and doubled drunkenly as he staggered through the forest’s gripping branches.

_Where are you, you goddamned—_

“Sylvain!” A voice. Felix crashed into the man’s broad back, the tip of his sword biting into he loam so that it didn’t do the same to Sylvain’s shins instead. He nearly lost his footing as he tried to spot just what it was that had left the man transfixed.

“Felix!”

It wasn’t some monster-faced man as he’d imagined but a woman, petite, and with a head of strawberry-colored hair.

“I can’t believe that you’re here!”

Felix yanked his sword from where it’d rooted itself into the ground but it was too late. The woman had already thrown herself into Sylvain’s chest. His stomach lurched before he realized that he recognized her face.

“Annette!” Sylvain answered for them both, his lance clattering to the ground as he awkwardly braced his arms around her. It wasn’t like him to fumble with a woman, a droll voice inside his head observed.

“Oh, thank the goddess! When I — I’ve heard the east is so — well, I was just afraid that...” She stuttered back a step, her head still tipped as she stared into Sylvain’s face. “Ah! Mercie! Come out, it’s alright, it’s Sylvain and Felix!”

“Sylvain and — oh, my!” A second woman materialized from the shadows, draped with a veil and with her fingers pressed against her lips in surprise. She didn’t look much like the Mercedes that he remembered but, then again, none of them looked much like what they’d once been.

“What are you doing out here?” Sylvain’s voice was low and droning, as if he were listening to him from the bottom of a pool. Annette had looked towards Felix, her cheeks turning pink while Mercedes answered for them both. _Pink_, he thought again. Pink like... flowers or... like a mouth, swallowing...

He lurched to the side and overcorrected, falling into the sharp corner of Sylvain’s pauldron instead. The forest flashed under the flutter of his eyelids. Someone said something but it was a toneless sound that was impossible for him to understand. He focused instead on the dull pinch of his eyes rolling backwards. _Stop it_, he insisted half-heartedly, but mostly he was relieved.

_So tired_. All he wanted was to rest. Not forever, maybe, but just for a moment. Just to close his eyes.

* * *

Annette was watching Felix sleep. Sylvain recognized the look darkening her features. _What were you thinking_, he imagined she wanted to tell him; _you need to be more careful. Don’t you know how horrible it would be if you died?_

He rubbed at his eyes, embarrassed by the jealous pinch that had buried itself between his ribs. What right did he have to feel that way? If not for them, perhaps Felix really would have died — and not from something proud, like he deserved, but from some nameless imperial bastard and Sylvain’s inability to do anything that didn’t hurt someone else along the way.

“Here.” He looked up from his sulking to spot Mercedes standing above him, her hands outstretched with an offering. Bread, he realized. He took it from her, bewildered by the fact that it wasn’t stale or flecked with mold. She smiled at him before taking a seat at his side beside their modest campfire.

“Thanks, Mercedes.” He ate slowly in the hopes that she wouldn’t see how desperately hungry he’d been.

“I...” she started, her voice that same sweet dove-song he remembered from a different life. “I’m sorry, Sylvain. I’ve heard rumors about what was happening in the east, but I had no idea that it...”

“It’s alright,” he insisted as she trailed off. “You don’t need to be out here to help, you know?” He flashed a smile at her. It seemed to work. Still, it nearly made him sick that she’d read them so easily. Was it really that obvious? He’d spent so many days convincing himself that they still had a chance. Had it only taken an evening for her to see the truth?

“Besides,” he continued tritely. “We’re all still here, aren’t we? And I know we might not look as dashing as usual, but generally Felix and I are quite heroic. All we need is a good bath. Don’t worry.”

“Alright, if you say so,” she acquiesced, her expression softening even if they both knew that he was lying. “In any case, thank goodness that we found you. I have to admit that I think we are a little lost.” Sylvain thought back on what she’d said before.

“Why is it that you want to go to the monastery, anyway? It’s not exactly a prime destination anymore, you know? From what I’ve heard it’s in ruins and full of bandits.” And a fearsome ghost, if you were to believe the rumors. It seemed a fitting enough place for that sort of thing. Mercedes’ brows arched.

“You really don’t remember?” He frowned. “Of course, you’ve had so much else to worry about, so naturally — well, just, it’s been five years, Sylvain.”

“Five years?”

“Since...” She looked to her toes. “Since we promised to return. After the ball, back when we were students. I know, it’s silly, but I thought that perhaps... That perhaps it was the right thing to do. It would have made Dimitri happy, don’t you think?”

He combed his fingers through his hair. Had it really already been five years? That seemed absurd. How had he lost so much time?

“Yeah,” he answered distractedly. “He would have loved it, Mercie.” They were silent for a moment.

“Why don’t you come with us?”

“Ah,” he replied with a self conscious laugh. “I don’t know about that.”

“Surely you aren’t planning to find another fight, are you?” He winced.

“That’s what we do, Mercedes,” he countered gently. “It’s important.” Her face pinched into a hurt look as she glanced over in Felix’s direction.

“Just a day, at least.” He sighed.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s just that...” It’s just that he didn’t want to see that place again. It was just another skeleton, wasn’t it? And how well would Felix suffer through another one of Dimitri’s requiems? _Not well_, that was the answer, even if he wanted to be so stubborn about it.

“Please. For us to meet like this, and then to just part again it... it doesn’t seem right.”

He watched as Annette leaned forward to tuck a blanket higher against Felix’s chin. Her fingers lingered on his chest afterwards, perhaps feeling for some sign that he was still alive. _Don’t_, a little voice insisted, but he bit it back, as gritted as he teeth may have been.

“Alright,” he managed finally, dipping his head at her defeatedly. “But just for the day.”

* * *

They found Ashe in the morning. Well, to be more apt, he’d nearly skewered Felix with an arrow before Annette had called out to him in her unflappable sing-song. Sylvain was starting to have a sneaking suspicion that he and Felix were the only ones who had been too ground-down to look forward to that auspicious date. 

Had Felix remembered? It was difficult to tell. He had been his usual quiet self in the morning, rising early to clear the camp as an unspoken thank-you for Mercedes’ healing hands. Would he have told him if he had?

Sylvain wasn’t so certain. Surely some things had changed between them, and preferably for the better — after all, sleeping with someone usually had that affect. But what they did wasn’t usual. Nothing was _usual_ in a war. Not eating, or sleeping, or fucking; not walking, even, transformed instead into that endless march of theirs. That was, at least, the answer he told himself as he wondered why they both slipped on their masks again after the afterglow of whatever shabby bed they’d made had disappeared.

Anyway, it was hardly the time to think about that now. Now they were, for some unthinkable reason, crossing the last steep pass that stood in between them and Garreg Mach. Ashe and Annette were chattering happily together, as if they were en route to some picnic. Well, it _was_ a reunion, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t be surprised to see Ingrid swooping in next, or perhaps Dedue’s dark shadow would suddenly appear, his face as enigmatic as ever as he passed on some request from —

No. That wasn’t right. Sylvain’s stomach iced. Dimitri was dead. He had no requests left for them; or none, at least, other than they keep fighting on, and not even Dedue had to tell them that.

“There!” Annette danced to the approaching cliff side, her arms raised in triumph. “Look! There it is!”

He glanced over at Felix as they followed after her. To the rest of them he likely appeared as unmoved as ever, but Sylvain had spotted that tic of his — the slight pinch at the corners of his eyes that suggested that he wasn’t as emotionless as he would have liked to have been.

If everything had been different maybe Sylvain would have reached out to him. _We don’t have to go_, he could have offered. Maybe he could have held his hand. Instead they simply trudged forward until they were all teetering at the edge.

“Is that...” Ashe started, shielding his eyes with the back of one hand and pointing with the other. Sylvain followed the line of his finger and felt his chest tighten as he spotted the rabble of a fight in the field below them. _Fucking bandits_, he thought first. His mind buzzed into more complicated words as his eyes settled on a head of mint-colored hair. “Is that the professor?”

“It can’t be,” Annette contended. Sylvain’s mouth grew dry as he noticed something else they hadn’t yet seen. A figure in black was on the field as well. They’d carved a wide berth for themselves within the melee. It was easy to spot the gold of their hair, even from a distance.

Sylvain turned. Felix had already seen, too; but of course he had, his eyes were, after all, well-honed to a battlefield. He watched as one of his dark brows arched into a delicate curve, and the way that the muscles in his jaw tensed and loosened and tensed again.

“Oh!” Mercedes clapped her palm over her mouth as she spotted him next. “It’s Dimitri!” Her voice slipped into a wavering cry echoed by Annette as well.

“Felix...” The man turned to settle those funereal eyes of his on him for the third time. “I...”

_I see it. I see that shadow at your heel; the monster under your bed, the curse, that bloody poltergeist, living in your head for years and yet only now I see it. I’m sorry._

But how could he say that? Annette and Mercedes had thrown their arms around each other and Ashe was at their side, and all of three of them already celebrating their shocked relief.

“Let’s go!” He gaped wordlessly at Annette as she suddenly broke free from their huddle to dash back to where they’d come. “We have to go help him!”

“And Byleth!” Ashe peeped the words, excited, as if they were readying themselves for a homecoming instead of a culling.

“Wait,” Sylvain stammered, but they’d already left him in their wake. Even Mercedes trotted along with them, her hands clutched to her chest.

Felix followed stiffly after them, his sword already drawn. It was difficult to make out just where its hilt ended and his arm began. All of it was a weapon, he realized, and him as well. That was their charge, their noble duty, although Sylvain had started to forget the reason why.

_You don’t have to go_, he wanted to yell out at him; and by _you_, as always, he meant _we_. But he didn’t, and Felix didn’t turn to challenge his silence, and so the war marched on.


	6. To Bend or Break

Felix had expected the monastery to be a ruin but it wasn’t, really. It had faired as well as any other place endlessly ransacked and overlooked, but most of the buildings still stood of their own accord. The classrooms were still draped with their eerie banners celebrating nations that weren’t so familiar now. Even the greenhouse, albeit overgrown, was still full of life and the lake was positively thriving from being free of hungry students for so long.

He hated it; considered, more than once, using his middling magic to burn it to the ground.

Instead he agreed to help them rebuild it. He wasn’t quite certain why. None of them had asked the question. For some reason the monastery had drawn them all in like moths to a flame. He and Sylvain and the rest had been the first to make their return, but in the days that came later the dusty halls had been filled with pilgrims from every corner of Fódlan.

Apparently Byleth had charmed not only the Church into their ranks but stragglers from Adrestia and Leicester as well. Felix had been shocked that the professor had overtaken Claude’s impeccable allure, especially with that flat expression of his, but still Marianne had come, and then Ignatz, and even Lorenz.

But then Felix had held an unexpected conversation with the latter man when they’d come upon each other in the officer’s yard— with Lorenz eying his dirty clothes with his usual horrified stare, and looking prim and neat himself as if by regulation — and he’d told him that Claude had sent them there himself. _It’s over_, he’d told him, uncharacteristically grim. Leicester would fall no matter how valiantly they fought. Raphael had fled as well, not to the monastery but to his sister, leaving only Hilda, as stubborn as a thorn, at Claude’s side in Derdriu.

_Don’t worry_, Lorenz had added afterwards with a tittering sound, _that man is frustratingly good at keeping himself alive. And Hilda... well, Hilda is too skillful with an axe to do anything but survive._

Felix had nodded, and hadn’t told him that he’d known plenty of clever men and brave women who had already died.

“Good morning, Felix.” He looked up from his work of repointing one of the monastery walls to spot Annette picking her way down the stairs. She had a bundle in her arms which she nearly dropped when the toe of her boot suddenly caught on one of the steps. He stood but she was quicker, bracing her arm against the wall with a squeal just before she’d toppled over.

_Well. At least she’s learned how to catch herself_, he thought to himself dryly.

“Are you hungry?” She continued on cheerily, as if her stumble had never happened.

“Good morning,” he answered, wiping his dusty palms against his coat before accepting one of the sweet buns she’d brandished at him. She smiled and took a seat on a step with a bun of her own. That made him feel a little uneasy. Working in silence suited him, but this sudden development meant that he was supposed to take a break, and a break meant talking to her. He’d never been terribly skilled in that arena to begin with, but what talent he’d once mustered had been long lost thanks to the war.

But he’d never managed to be cruel to her in the way that he brushed off the rest of his classmates, once, and it didn’t seem right to start the practice now.

“Are you working all alone?”

“Yes,” he told her as he took a seat beside her.

“Maybe Ashe can help you?” Felix shook his head.

“Ashe and Ignatz are helping the guards fletch arrows.” He nodded at a group of dark shapes perched at the top of wall across the lake. She followed the gesture, squinting to make them out against the bright morning sun.

“Oh. Well, then maybe...” Her voice drawled off as she considered who was left. He silently ticked off the names as well. Lorenz would hardly do anything that would cause him to break into a sweat. That went double for Linhardt, who’d arrived only three days earlier and hadn’t emerged from his bedroom since. Perhaps she’d suggest Caspar, but Felix knew that he likely hadn’t escaped from that bedroom, either. And Sylvain was in the stables with Marianne and faced with endless mucking, so that was that. “Um...”

“It’s alright.” He waved his free hand at her. “It’s not hard work.” She eyed the pile of boulder-sized bricks beside him with apprehension.

“Mercie and I are meeting with the professor and some of the other Church mages,” she added apologetically, “or else I would—”

“It’s alright, Annette.” She flushed as he cut her short.

_Shit._

“You always work yourself too hard,” she added quietly. Her voice, meek in place of its usual cheerful burble, made his stomach sink.

“I would build a hundred walls if it meant avoiding some morning march,” he offered, trying to adopt that light tone that Sylvain always used to joke away a tense moment. It failed. Spectacularly, he realized gloomily, as Annette stared back at him in bewilderment. His stomach sunk further as he realized it wasn’t his attempt at being lighthearted that had doomed him, but the idea that he, of all people, would ever shy away from a fight.

“Has it been that terrible in the east?” He tore the bun into smaller pieces and turned them between his fingers. ”If only we’d found Dimitri sooner...” She jumped as he suddenly stood.

“I need to finish this,” he told her brusquely. She winced, pulling her brows high as she tried to understand just where it was that she had misstepped.

“Of course.” She forced her voice into another sugared tone. It was far less convincing than usual. “Right, then. Well. Just don’t push yourself too hard, alright? I’ll...Goodbye.”

He nodded and listened to her light steps as she flitted away. She hadn’t deserved that. Even he knew that. But it was easier to be the man they thought he was, after all, than to tell her the truth.

* * *

It was strange to step into the old bathhouse again after bathing in so many icy streams. To be honest, the steamy place had always been too hot. It made it difficult for Felix to catch his breath as he pulled his shirt over his head and kicked his feet bare. Even as a child he’d preferred the cold. As a student he’d tolerated the baths mostly because he’d known he’d be ostracized (more) for slipping into the lake instead. He missed the duchy’s rivers now perhaps even more than he had then. 

But now it was uncomfortable not just because it was crowded or because it was hot, but because its patrons were all watching him as if he’d grown a second head.

At first he hadn’t understood the reason why. He was no more filthy than they were fromtheir shared task of resettling the monastery. They were all Church men, which meant that they had strong ties to the kingdom (or the land that the kingdom had once been), so they couldn’t have had an issue with his pedigree.

It wasn’t until he’d folded his slacks beneath the rest of his clothes and turned towards the water that he’d realized it. It wasn’t _him_, it was his _body_; and theirs, fit but with a healthy fullness whereas his was too-thin for the lean muscles left behind. Some of them had old scars — one was even missing an eye — but they weren’t striped with gnarled slashes like he was. He stepped quickly into the water, even if the heat stole the breath from his lungs, and tried to shake the feeling of being some pitiful creature on display.

He’d nearly finished scrubbing the grit from his hair when the first man beside him suddenly stood with a yelp. He looked at his arms in confusion while the fellow across from him did the same. Felix watched, perplexed, as the full room of bathers began to twitch and dash from the water as if they’d been bitten by some sharp-toothed fish. Which was impossible, of course, because the water was clear and most obviously free of any beasties that meant to hunt them out.

“Ah,” he heard a voice sigh as the last straggler escaped. “Much better.” Felix felt his lips pinch into a smirk despite his best intentions.

“Linhardt,” he greeting him dryly as the named man sloshed forward from a steamy corner. So many of his classmates had changed — hardened by the war or the things that had happened because of it — but Linhardt looked as fresh and boyish as ever, if perhaps a bit more dandy than before now that he’d grown out his hair. It trailed behind him like strands of seaweed as he settled himself across from him.

“I can’t believe you haven’t come to say hello,” Linhardt pouted. “And after so many years.”

“You’ve been the one holed up.”

“Yes, and so I see you’ve known exactly where I’ve been.” He tutted. “For the son of a duke you really have no manners.”

“You’re one to talk. What did you just do?”

“Oh, it’s boring. Don’t worry about it.” He stretched his arms along the coping of the pool and watched Felix with a languid stare. “Hm. But I do so love that glare of yours. I think it’s gotten even better. Here. Don’t look away.”

Felix rolled his eyes. They narrowed after as he spotted one of Linhardt’s arms snaking under the surface again. It wasn’t difficult to deduce just what the bastard was groping after.

“Are you serious?” Linhardt’s laughter bounced across the tiles.

“No,” he drawled, drifting forward to close the space between them. Felix steadied his approach with the plant of his toes against his slender chest. “It was a joke. Humor, you know? I would suggest you give it a try some time. It can be quite delightful.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” he insisted icily. Linhardt’s lips drew into a pout.

“Am I really that simple to you? Not that I would turn down the offer, of course, but, to be honest with you, you just look so dreadful.”

“Thanks.” Linhardt swatted his leg away to swim to a spot at his side.

“I’m serious. I thought that kingdom of yours was a holy one, hm? So why is it that all of your mages are so terrible?” Felix flinched against the wall of the pool as Linhardt suddenly leaned forward. “Goodness, enough. I won’t bite. Not now, at least. Haven’t you heard a word of what I’ve said?” His fingers, warm and dripping from the water, formed a tent against Felix’s brow. 

A shudder filled him as all of the old aches and crooked-healed places in his body began to melt away.

“What was that?”

“Good and proper work,” Linhardt replied, withdrawing to sit benignly at his side again. “As much as I do despise it. Really, dear Hugo, I am a man who appreciates a little pain as much as the best of us, but you’ve gone quite overboard.” His dreamy eyes turned towards the pad of bare feet against tile.

“And here is the man responsible for it, I imagine,” Linhardt continued as Sylvain emerged from the steam. Felix felt his heart drop, not just from the way that his brow had furrowed at the sight of them, but at the sight of _him_ as well. Was that what the bathers had seen when Felix had undressed earlier? He’d become so accustomed to the north that to him Sylvain had seemed lean, perhaps, but not gaunt the way that he did now, his height amplifying the effect to a garish degree.

And why was it that they were the only ones sucked dry in a place so filled with soldiers?

“Linhardt,” Sylvain greeted him with an uncharacteristically curt tone.

“Lord Gautier,” he replied with an over-embellished wave of his arm. “How good to see you. And aren’t you just the image of how I remember you.” Sylvain did not answer as he stepped into the pool. “Right then. I certainly have no desire to stay in a place where I am not wanted.” They both watched him silently as he slunk (somehow obscenely, in only a way that he could manage) to the spot where he’d stored his clothes. Felix should have said _goodbye_, maybe, or _thank you_, but those were both dangerous words as far as Linhardt was concerned.

“Ah!” Sylvain snapped as the mage finally made his exit.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he replied with a wince, inspecting his arm. “It felt like something just... bit me.” Felix sunk deeper into the water.

_What a nightmare._

He watched quietly as Sylvain scrubbed himself. It wasn’t the first time they’d bathed together. Usually Sylvain chattered about whatever task he’d tackled that day, but not today. Felix had a suspicion as to why. And, as well trained as he was in terms of tempering Sylvain’s jealousy, he didn’t have the energy to manage it that afternoon.

“I’ve finished,” he told him unceremoniously as he stood.

“Wait.” He frowned as he felt the coil of his fingers around his wrist. They were followed after by the heat of his mouth.

“Not here,” Felix insisted between his teeth. When he’d been a student it had been the chief of his midnight fantasies, but that had been before. “Someone will come.”

“I don’t care,” Sylvain insisted. He turned him between his palms until his back was against the coping.

“_Sylvain_.” He shivered as his mouth trailed up the line of his throat. At first it was tender enough to convince him to relent, but soon after it had turned to teeth that sunk hungrily against his shoulder as he shoved him into a bent pose against the pool’s ledge.

“Ah,” he gasped, his mind dragging in the heat. The water roiled between their bodies. He realized how despicable his old fantasies had been — imagined the people who were to come after, eager to clean themselves only to be sullied by what they’d done.

No. Maybe they deserved it. All of those staring faces, and not just in the baths but in the dining hall as well, and in the old classrooms, the corridors, beneath the ruined rafters of the chapel. They had been watching him since he’d first arrived. He wanted nothing more than to strangle their pity from them.

“Don’t.” Sylvain did. It didn’t matter. At least his green-eyed anger wasn’t pity, too.

* * *

“Ingrid!” Sylvain called out the name with near-wonderment as he spotted her golden hair between a set of murmuring guards. She turned quickly at his voice, her face filling with a smile.

“Sylvain!” They trotted to each other, for once free of plate and mail as they embraced. She clutched him tight against her in a way that might have been misinterpreted under any other circumstance.

“So you’ve managed to keep yourself alive, have you?” She teased him as she cupped his face between her hands. He laughed.

“As well as you have, at least. Have you just arrived?”

“Earlier this afternoon, yes. I would have come earlier, just that I—” He waved her excuse away with the flick of his hand. Of anyone in the monastery, he understood. She nodded, her eyes filling with something more heavy than just cheer. “I’ve been looking for you, actually. I’ve already seen Felix. He’s become quite the mason.” Sylvain laughed again.

“Hidden talents, right?” Sylvain’s eyes dropped to the little satchel gripped between her fingers. Even from a distance he could smell the sweetness of fresh-baked bread and something savory. She caught his stare with a grin.

“I’ve stolen something to eat. Here, come with me.” She steered him towards the broad steps leading to the lake. He let her, stringing his arm around her shoulder with a theatrical yawn that finally made her jab her elbow into his side.

“You’re impossible,” she muttered. He laughed and felt a comfortable warmth settle in his chest as her smile lingered, too.

“Here.” She took a flour-dusted loaf from her folded kerchief and tore a chunk for him. He took it, and the hunk of pale cheese she offered him afterwards. He waved them both in the air in celebration as she slipped a wineskin from its hidden place in her cloak.

“Ingrid,” he teased. “What a thief! At this rate the professor will have you mucking stables for years.”

“I hear that’s all you’ve been doing since you’ve been here,” she retorted dryly, pointing the skin in his direction after she’d taken a long draw.

“Well, when one hones one’s skill to such a degree...” She groaned at the idea and shook her head. They both looked to the lake, afterwards, watching the last orange rays of the setting sun waver in the water.

“I thought it would be different,” she told him. “I heard such terrible stories about what had happened here. But it’s the same, isn’t it? I’ve even seen that grey tomcat — you remember? With the crooked ear? As if we were just students yesterday.” He nodded. Her mention of that scraggly cat reminded him of some old story. He told it as they ate their simple meal, sending them both into waves of nostalgic laughter that became louder as they finished the wine.

“Oh,” Ingrid sighed finally as the skin dripped dry. “You really were terrible, Sylvain. Honestly, you were lucky that things ended the way that they did. I don’t think you would have graduated, otherwise.”

“Probably not,” he agreed, grinning, although the feature faded quicker than he’d intended. _Lucky_. Was that the word? Yes, maybe, but only because they’d won the cosmic gamble that had left them alive. He fiddled with his sleeve.

“I’ve... I’ve seen Dima,” Ingrid told him, finally, her voice dipping to a whisper. He nodded and kept his eyes steady on his fingers. “Sylvain, have you spoken with him?” His brows crinkled.

“No.” He heard a deep breath sigh between her lips. They were quiet for a long while.

“Here,” she announced suddenly, clapping her palm against his arm. “I want to show you something.”

“What? The cat?” She rolled her eyes.

“Not the cat. Come on. It’s in my room.” He snapped his head in her direction as she stood. She stiffened, realizing her mistake too late.

“Well, it’s a little overdue,” he drawled, “but I can’t say that I’m not flattered that you’ve finally submitted to my charms.”

“No,” she deadpanned, waving a finger at him. “That isn’t it. Say another word and I’ll throw you in the lake.”

“Listen, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She shoved him lightly as they began to trail along the water. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?”

“I’m not listening to you.”

“And I should have known that you were in it for the long game. Clever, Galatea.” She batted his hand away as he made to reach out towards her.

“Just shut up and come with me.”

It was strange to make the walk towards their old rooms again. His thoughts, already softened by the wine, lingered on a dozen different memories of making the trek together before — their arms filled with books borrowed from the library, or stiff with fatigue from a long training session. Usually Felix would have completed their trio, a sulking shadow at their heels that somehow made the scene more complete. He wondered, idly, just where the swordsman was.

Her room, too, was pulled cleanly from his memories. Not that he’d had the chance to spend much time in it before. His eyes scanned the dusty shelves, the rug snagged into a crumpled shape, and finally the small pile of things she’d brought with her and had left still unpacked: weapons and plate. Of course it was. Faerghus had nothing else left to offer.

He sat on the bed and watched her, amused and not at all clued in on whatever she meant to show him. She dug through a small sand-colored bag before waving something aloft with a triumphant sound. It was a little book, leather-bound and nearly overstuffed with loose leafs of paper. The bed creaked as she took a seat at his side.

“Here,” she told him as she spread the book open on her lap. “It’s my old diary.”

“Are you entirely certain you don’t mean to profess your love for me?”

“Quite certain,” she replied dryly. “I know it’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve been carrying this with me since... well, for a long time.” She flipped through the pages. His brows peaked as he recognized some of the handwriting clumsily scrawled across the parchment.

“I remember,” he offered suddenly. “You were always dragging this old thing around.” Diary or not, it had also been a magical book of spells for their childhood adventures; or, the base of a tower built from sticks and leaves to be settled by toy soldiers; and, more than once, the canvas for their clumsy attempts at art. A charmed noise slipped through his lips as he spotted one such work. She settled on it as well, her fingers tracing the four odd shapes drawn in ink and chalky pigment.

“Look. This was when we decided on just what it was we would be one day.” He nodded, tilting his head slightly to make out the designs. There, at the top left corner, was a neat sketch of a man with a slightly square-shaped head sitting on a three-legged throne. Dimitri’s contribution, naturally, and a premonition of his coronation.

Below that was a boxy thing drawn in blue and accented by a long sprig of something yellow bursting from the top. He tapped at it.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” She cringed, grinning.

“Yes. A knight, naturally.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding his head sagely. “Naturally.” He focused then on the shape next to it, which looked suspiciously similar except for the fact that it was a little less impressionistic than her attempt — and accompanied by a pair of outrageous flexing arms. He groaned.

“I copied you,” he realized.She snorted. “Shit. That’s a little embarrassing.” He looked to the fourth figure before the horrid thing was burned into his brain. 

The final feature was a huge black swirl that dominated the lower half of the page. It looked as though it had been drawn by a blind man aboard a ship caught in a swell. There was a circle at its center — although it was more of an oval, really — along with four spidery lines all jutting in different directions. It was completed by a long, S-shaped thing that was bursting from its middle and was crowned by a sudden dash of yellow seemingly borrowed from Ingrid’s knight.

“What the fuck is that?” Ingrid’s shoulders shook with a breath of swallowed laughter.

“That was Felix,” she told him, her voice strained from keeping steady. “Don’t you remember? He — _ha_ — h-he wanted to be a swan.”

Sylvain snatched the book from her to inspect it more closely.

“A _swan_?”

“You really don’t remember? In the gardens in Fhirdiad, next to the roses, there was that pond that had a pair of swans. They were horrible — always biting everyone. Felix loved them. He was always feeding them. I don’t know how they didn’t pick him to death. It made the groundskeeper so angry. What was his name?”

“Lyle? Loryl?” She shook her head.

“I don’t know. In any case, Felix was absolutely enthralled by the idea that those nasty old things could both swim and fly.”

“But they can’t do either well!” That finally sent Ingrid into a fit of laughter which he joined as well.

“He was so fucking weird,” Sylvain groaned, his eyes still watering with laughter.

“I know,” she agreed fondly. “He was always in his own world, wasn’t he? Do you remember all of the stories he used to tell us?”

“Yes. They never made any sense.”

“Never. And he was always drawing, and none of his drawings looked like anything at all. And then he’d cry because we couldn’t puzzle out just what it was that he’d made.”

“I mean, obviously,” Sylvain added, gesturing to the eldritch horror on the page.

“But then he’d dry his eyes and his mind would have already spun off on its next adventure. I admired him for that, really.” She traced one of the jagged shapes — a wing, perhaps — and smiled. “I always thought of him as a bit of a little brother. Which was ridiculous, of course, but with Glenn... I don’t know. Anyway, I think that he liked to be doted after, don’t you? So it probably wouldn’t have bothered him if I did think something like that. All he wanted was to give us love and to be loved for it. I worried about that, too. Thought that he’d be swallowed up by how cruel everything can be.” She brushed her finger against the yellow shape that could have been a beak.

“Glenn and I would protect him, I told myself,” she continued more quietly. “That sweet, strange, gentle little boy. And then they took all of that from him, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“Ingrid...” She shook her head, her eyes shadowed by the furrow of her brow.

“What kind of knight am I if I can’t even protect one person?” She cupped her hands over her face. He didn’t wager this was what she’d meant to tell him when she’d lured him to her room.

“Listen, Ingrid, Felix can protect himself.” Her fingers slipped to her lap as she glanced over at him. His chest ached at the sight of her broken look.

“He looks horrible, Sylvain,” she told him lowly. “And you do, too.”

“Hey, now.”

“I should have fought with you.” She flinched as he gripped her shoulders.

“You protected your people. _That’s_ what knights do. And Felix and I did the same. That’s all there is to it. It isn’t fair, but we don’t have a choice.”

“And what people are left? When all of this is over, if we survive it, what will it have been for?”

No matter how desperately she’d asked the question, he didn’t have an answer. He stared instead at the diary again, his stomach sinking as he remembered that there had been two knights there on the page.

* * *

Sylvain left Ingrid’s room some time later determined to hunt Felix out. He wasn’t quite certain what it was he meant to say to him, but he imagined an apology would be a good start. He’d been too rough with him in the bath house. He was too rough with him most times. He tried not to linger on that thought for too long. 

Felix’s room was empty. Sometimes he liked to sit by the lake when it was late and quiet, but it was free of him, now, too. He wasn’t the sort of person to linger in many other places. Sylvain turned his toes towards the training grounds, suddenly confident in his search.

He heard him before he saw him. It wasn’t as if that place wasn’t suited to the sounds of sparring, but there was something eerie in hearing it now. But how like Felix, wasn’t it, to train even after he’d already proven himself in the war? What else could he possibly learn?

It was a naive assumption. Sylvain had plenty of them. He rounded the last corner into the arcade flanking the grounds and froze as he spotted the black shape that Felix had squared himself against.

Dimitri had abandoned that hulking cape of his and looked skeletal without it. What was worse was that he wasn’t brandishing one of the blunted swords left to rust in their stands along the yard but Areadbhar. The gruesome thing was currently needling the space next to Felix’s head as he dodged it with a quick set of dancing steps.

Felix was wielding both a sword and shield. It was unusual for him but he used them well. Still, it only took two further blows from Dimitri’s lance to crack the shield across its face. Sylvain’s voice grew painful in his throat. He knew that to cry out now would be disastrous — a distraction that would no doubt end in Felix’s death. To dash forward and stop them may have been even worse. But how could he just stand and watch as Dimitri cut him down?

Felix tossed the pieces of his shield aside with the flick of his arm. Sylvain thought he saw the shape of a smile on Dimitri’s lips as he lunged forward, lance raised again like the tail of a scorpion ready to strike. Instead of falling Felix dove in the same direction as that patch over Dimitri’s ruined eye, crouching below the lance’s cut to snatch at its staff. As he did he planted his heel against Dimitri’s chest and used the leverage to rip Areadbhar free. A bestial growl rumbled from the would-be king just as Felix tossed the weapon aside.

Dimitri tore at him again with his hands. Felix dug his toe into the sand to kick his sword back to his grip from where he’d dropped it to prepare his disarmament. His head snapped back as Dimitri landed a lucky blow, but he parried the next with his pommel. The move was followed after by two more swinging flourishes of his sword. They were clumsy, Sylvain thought icily; there was no way that they would have hit their mark.

It didn’t matter. Dimitri was still staggered, and that afforded Felix the opening he needed to sweep him from his feet with a low kick aimed at his heels. A breath ripped from Sylvain’s lips as he realized that he’d somehow won. His relief died soon after as he watched Felix lunge after the fallen man. He’d dropped his sword again, but his fists still made a sickening sound as he dashed them against Dimitri’s unguarded face.

He wasn’t sparring. He wasn’t even fighting. He was going to kill him.

“Felix!” Sylvain finally lurched forward. “Stop!”

He snatched at the iron brace of his back. It seemed impossible. Felix was still lashing forward. Sylvain slung his arms around his chest. That directed his clawing hands in his direction instead, which was a victory he was willing to accept. He drug him further backwards with the full ballast of his own weight. As they struggled a strange noise began to slip from Dimitri’s bloodied lips.

It was laughter, Sylvain realized, his own blood drawing cold.

“Let go!”

Sylvain staggered to his feet instead, wrenching Felix towards the door. He thanked the goddess for his height — and, for the first and last time, that Dedue was dead instead of there to have intervened in a far different way than he had himself. Dimitri’s wretched laughter followed after them as they stumbled into the yard outside. Felix made his snarling protest quite clear, but he didn’t speak again until Sylvain had wrestled him into a nearby abandoned bedroom. 

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“What the _fuck_ are _you_ doing?” Sylvain spat the question back at him with a far bolder tone. “What do you think they’ll do to you if you,” his voice hissed back into a whisper, “kill the fucking king?”

“He’s not a king!” Felix swiped at the blood dripping from his nose, which only managed to smear more from his ruined knuckles across his cheeks. “He’s a fucking _monster_! He killed them! Five years!”

Sylvain stepped forward to hush him before his attempted regicide became common knowledge. Felix dodged his grip as deftly as he’d dodged Dimitri before.

“Five years! And now they’re dead and look at what he’s done. Is that really your master, Sylvain? Will you bow to him as he tears everything down? Don’t you see what he wants?”

“It’s not—”

“Not what? Don’t be a fool!” His snarl twisted into a harrowed shape. “They trusted me. We fought for him. And now they’re gone, and he’s _alive_?”

_They_. He knew their faces as well as Felix did, although his were a little different. How many men and women had rallied to their banners when Felix’s father had demanded a resistance against Edelgard’s greedy charge? Sometimes they’d even been a shield for Sylvain to hide behind. But not Felix. He always fought alongside them, didn’t he? Always at the forward charge in those stupid useless jackets of his because he didn’t want to lose his speed by wearing a goddamned suit of arms.

“It’s my fault,” Felix continued with a groaning tone. “I knew what he was. I should have stopped him. I need to stop him.” The unspoken promise of his final words made something snap inside Sylvain’s chest.

“And then what?” He snarled back at him. “What will be left for the rest of us? They’ll hang you for it, Felix. Dimitri will die a hero and you’ll be another traitor added to the list. But I need you! Here, alive! Even if everything else is gone.”

“Why? So that you can keep taking from me, too?” Sylvain winced.

“I don’t,” Felix’s voice wavered, “I don’t want to be like this anymore. I can’t just keep on fighting, and I won’t do it for him. I’m _done_, Sylvain.” His name sounded more like a cry than a demand. Sylvain staggered forward to draw him against his chest. Felix fought his embrace at first, but quickly grew limp and unsteady between his arms.

“I’m sorry.” Sylvain chanted the word until they’d both sunk to the floor. They clung to each other like two bodies tossed together in a storm. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m so sorry.”

“Tomorrow,” he began again after he felt the last of Felix’s tensed muscles loosen, “we’ll leave. From the monastery. From Fódlan. Alright? South, west, it doesn’t matter. Let them have their war. It won’t end any differently if we’re not here to die for it.” Felix’s hands finally moved from their drag against the floor to palm his back.

“...alright.”

Sylvain nodded. _Alright_. 

Eventually Felix’s adrenaline ebbed away. Sylvain listened as his breathing steadied. Once he was certain that he was asleep he tipped him gently upwards into the bed and followed after. The sheets were full of dust and the carapaces of long-dead bugs, so he didn’t bother with their boots. He did wipe the blood from Felix’s face. It was horrible at first, but when he’d finished he didn’t look so different from what he’d been before. His mind wandered as he watched him dreaming.

Once they’d just been little boys. It seemed impossible to imagine. But in that time a life apart all Felix had ever wanted was to love, and be loved, and to be free. And Sylvain hadn’t protected him the way that he should have when they first came to wrangle those dreams of his away. But he was there now. He wasn’t going to fail him again.

And perhaps what he’d proposed wasn’t so brave a thing, but Felix had never wanted to be a hero. And when Sylvain had imagined himself as a dashing knight himself he’d only done it because he’d been too embarrassed to admit that he’d not shared his friends’ ambition to be much of anything at all.

The promise made his own heart settle. He slipped into a dreamless sleep. But instead of waking to a new dawn they woke instead to darkness, and to a harried call to arms that they couldn’t in good conscience ignore. And in the evening that came after, Felix’s father died.


	7. Royal Jelly

There was a lagoon near the Gronder outpost that reminded Felix of the lake at Garreg Mach. It was small and placid and shimmering, just like its wayward cousin, and studded with a crooked pier built from long slats of wood baked brittle by the sun. They creaked beneath his boots as he walked across them. The sound was joined by the steady _shaa-shaa_ of the water lapping against the pilings and the distant hooting of an owl. It was simple. Pleasant. Familiar.

He came to the end of the pier. His eyes settled on the moonlight glimmering against the surface as his fingers plucked at the rounds of the buttons at his throat. He folded his cloak into a neat square and set it beside a coil of rope left behind for mooring some boat that had long since disappeared. Next came his doublet and the shirt beneath it. His skin prickled as it was bared to the cold night air. The numb chill that came after was reassuring, like the touch of a mother he’d long buried against a fevered brow.

He looked again at the water after his feet were naked against the boards. The moon was full and bright. He could see his reflection clearly in the mirror of the lagoon. It wasn’t a man he recognized. 

The water rushed against his ears as he leapt from the pier. It was loud at first, but lulled into a dreamy quiet as the current settled. He kicked his legs so that the quicksilver of the surface bobbed into his line of vision again. The sound of his heartbeat echoed in the water as he watched the last ripples from his dive dissipate.

Glenn hadn’t been good at swimming. At the time it had seemed impossible that there was anything he couldn’t master. But Felix had seen his brother flailing and bobbing in one of the duchy’s ponds with his own eyes. He’d been so shocked that he’d laughed at the sight. Glenn had glared at him at first, but then he’d started to laugh as well. Then he’d splashed an armful of water at him and waved him into the pool.

_Alright, Lex_, he’d told him, latching onto his shoulders. _You’ll just have to swim for the both of us._ He’d been too small for such a task, but Glenn had planted his heels in the bank and pretended to float as Felix gallantly treaded water. He’d been so proud to finally be the one to carry him after so many years of riding on his shoulders.

_One day I’ll swim across the ocean_, Felix had promised him.

_An ocean is bigger than a pond_, his brother had insisted. _What happens if you get tired?_

_Then I’ll just fly_, he’d answered, as if it were common knowledge, and Glenn had laughed again.

_Of_ _course_.

His lungs began to burn. He bowed his arms into a graceful shape and swam towards the surface again.

“Shit,” a voice cried out in relief. “There you are. I thought I was going to have to jump in after you.”

The world beneath the lagoon’s surface had been an endless blue. Sylvain, in contrast, was red even in the moonlight. His hair — tousled and wild as he leaned over the edge of the pier — reminded Felix of a flame.

“What are you doing?” Sylvain continued, his voice softening. “It must be freezing in there. Come on.” He lowered chest-first against the boards to offer an arm in his direction.

“I’m not cold,” Felix answered, his eyes settling on the tips of his fingers. He heard Sylvain sigh.

“Are you...” Sylvain closed his mouth before the _alright_ he’d formed had the chance to slip through. “You don’t have to do this.” Felix dipped lower into the water so that it bobbed at the lobes of his ears. “You don’t have to forgive him for everything that’s happened.”

That wasn’t the divine bargain that his father had agreed to. And, moreover, it wasn’t as if Rodrigue had been the type of man to leave a debt behind. Glenn had died and in exchange his father had lived to protect his memory. And then Dimitri had been reborn, so it only came to reason that Rodrigue would die on his behalf. Payment and reward. Even Felix could understand terms like those. It didn’t matter if he liked them, just like it didn’t matter if they were kind.

“We can still leave.”

“Don’t you think,” Felix replied finally, “that no matter where we go, we’ll always find ourselves back here again?” Sylvain frowned.

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“It always has been before. I wish that it was you that I was always running towards. But it’s been Dimitri, hasn’t it? And from the very start. He was always drawing us both in.”

“He wasn’t,” Sylvain countered, although even Felix could hear the lie.

“Our promise. Will you let me break it?”

“What?” Sylvain’s face darkened as he stared down at him.

“When we die,” Felix told him, “I want to be the one to do it first.”

“Felix...”

“You’ll forgive me for it, won’t you?”

“Never,” Sylvain insisted. He leaned lower towards the water. “Come on. Get out of there.”

Felix took his hand. It was cold, the way it always was. Even with the chill of the frozen lagoon on his skin there was something comforting in how it felt. 

* * *

Dimitri wasn’t the only one of them who’d been turned into a monster. Felix had watched, sickened, as the creature that had once been Edelgard thrashed at them from her ill-gotten throne. He’d felt nothing as she fell. He’d focused on Sylvain instead, who had caught an arrow in the barrel of his thigh and had kept them both stranded at a safe distance from where Dimitri and Byleth had finally struck the empress down.

“Shit,” Sylvain had gasped, his eyes darting between the dais and Felix’s downturned face. “Holy shit. We did it.”

Felix had lingered by his side even after Mercedes dashed from her cover to coax the arrowhead loose. She and Sylvain had embraced each other afterwards, both filled with nervous laughter as they came to realize their victory aloud.

“Shit, Felix. It’s over!” Sylvain had sat forward then to take his head between his hands and kiss him. It was a quick, close-mouthed thing that wasn’t misplaced in a scene like that. Still, it made Mercedes’ cheeks turn pink. Sylvain spotted it and, laughing, gave her a kiss of her own.

A roar began to build from the kingdom’s ragtag troops as word spread about what had happened. The sound of it and Sylvain’s delighted cursing had all blurred into a steady drone that had filled his ears. It was over. He’d looked down at hands. One was still gripping his sword and flecked with gore drawn from the men who had woken that morning in that very castle still living and breathing and someone. Surely they had dreamed to cry out those words themselves. Maybe they’d done so already when they’d been so confident that Dimitri was dead. And perhaps they’d sung the same when news that his father the Duke had fallen and left the last bastion of the kingdom finally unguarded.

But they wouldn’t chant those words any longer, and nevermore. Fate, fickle as ever, had at last condemned them and offered him an olive branch in exchange. He’d watched as Byleth led Dimitri from Edelgard’s body towards the roar of the soldiers outside.

An olive branch and a crown.

He’d looked away to eye the colorful glass of the windows lining the nave. It has been sunny outside. That had seemed rather cruel. Still, it’d made the glass glitter like a wall of gemstones from where the windows were stacked in a line along the hall to form a parade of emperors and heroes and goddesses all built out of crystal and lead. 

Would they break them in the days that would come to pass? Or would they simply rename some golden-haired emperor in the line? Repurpose the old stories, even, until the rift that had once torn Fódlan apart was forgotten in its entirety? 

“Long live the king!” A chant had built in the courtyards outside until it was nearly deafening. He wasn’t really a king, not yet, but a proper coronation seemed hardly necessary. Long live the king, long live the emperor, long live the goddess. It was only the knights that didn’t live long.

“Felix,” Sylvain had said again. He’d looked to him in his crooked sprawl against the bloodied marble and felt the knots in his back relax. Sylvain had loosened his fingers from his sword and twined his fingers in its place. They’d been slick and tacky and trembling. Felix had squeezed them tight.

“It’s over,” Felix had agreed. “We’ve won.”

* * *

Sylvain thought that perhaps Felix had finally been convinced that they weren’t going to die.

It had taken a long time. First had come the grueling work of pacifying Enbarr. It was hard to shake the fear of death with so many of the dead around. Then had come their march back to Fhirdiad, during which they’d had to quell the inevitable bands of bandits and would-be avengers from the south. But afterwards they’d arrived back through the city gates again and found them draped with long, fluttering banners celebrating a dynasty once thought dead, and the fact that they were alive to see them again might have been the first thing to tease a fresh breath into their lungs.

In their time away the capital had started to look like a proper jewel of Faerghus once more. They were greeted by a cheering crowd that showered them with petals — _real_ people, common people and not just soldiers, and real flowers, even — and, when a young woman suddenly dashed forward to offer a rose to Ashe and surprised him with a kiss on the cheek (he’d turned nearly the color of her gift), Sylvain could have sworn he’d even seen Felix grin. 

Next they were given new names. After being stolen away by a fleet of attendants to finally tame his wild mane and do away with his matted furs, Dimitri was crowned a king. Byleth followed afterwards to assume control of the Church, and for some reason in a way that made it seem as though he had been born for the role himself, too. The King formally recognized Felix as a duke in the same day and, in a stroke of foresight that demonstrated that he’d truly regained his wits, didn’t make the mistake of celebrating his father’s sacrifice when he did.

Sylvain was bestowed with a heavy title as well. Apparently his father had fallen after he’d left him behind — not to some gallant battle but to a chill that had never left him. It wasn’t a surprise. Many men of Gautier had succumbed to the same. Perhaps they weren’t meant to live in such a northern place. Still, he’d been somewhat blindsided by the fact that the news had bothered him. He’d wondered if his father had searched for him at his bedside or if he’d simply been relieved to finally be free of all of his disappointment.

It was a worry that he tried his best to ignore. There were plenty of distractions to be had. They were heroes, for one, which was endlessly entertaining. But moreover they had not one but two kingdoms to repair, and such a task required more work than any one of them could have imagined.

But first, and after the initial bustle of their victory had faded, they’d decided to finally celebrate the fact that they’d somehow managed to survive.

In many ways their assembly reminded him of their drunken exploits in the monastery so many years before. It was proposed by Dimitri, just as before. And, as in the past, he was quickly overwhelmed by their eagerness to celebrate and retreated to his room.

This time, however, Byleth had lingered (Dedue, still otherworldly after his miraculous return, had not), and they were also joined by the allies they’d made in the aftermath of the monastery’s fall. The grand arches of the palace’s Great Hall were certainly different from the monastery yard as well, and Sylvain knew that whatever wine they’d stolen from its kitchens could never compare to what Dimitri had rustled for them now.

But they still took their old places in a circle on the ground and ignored the glassware provided to them to take long draws from bottle-mouths instead. And when Lorenz had suggested that he thought himself a better shot than Sylvain, he’d seized upon his challenge to toss coins into the helmet of a suit-of-arms with vigor.

“Seventeen!” Sylvain cried the number as he took a victory swig from the bottle clutched in his left hand. Lorenz groaned.

“That hardly counts. It’s only gone in because it’s bounced against the visor.”

“What?” Sylvain laughed. “It went in, d’inn’it?” He slung his arm around Lorenz’s stiff shoulders. “Don’t be a poor sport. Seventeen to twelve, you bloody bastard.”

“Yes, well...” He clacked the bottom of his bottle against the dusty old bottle of port that the insufferable dandy had procured and laughed.

“Yes, well. And now you owe me a horse, was it? Good teeth, no mules! Although I’m sure yours are very pretty.” The wine bubbled as he took another drag. Still hooked around Lorenz’s shoulders, he slowly surveyed the room. It was late. The hall was thrown into thick shadows only marginally chased away by a half-dozen sputtering sconces. Someone was singing — Annette and Mercedes, yes, there they were, arm-in-arm, with Mercedes bobbing her arm in the air like some sort of conductor as Ignatz watched on with a bleary smile — and their melody was echoing in the heights of the sweeping rafters.

“Three, two... one!”

His eyes darted towards a trio arranged at the center of the room. All three had the green glass of their bottles upended. That seemed dangerous. He glanced down — there was Caspar, first, looking somewhat shrunken without his armor but making a gallant attempt at emptying his bottle. Ingrid, surprisingly, was the second contestant in the drinking match, her eyes narrowed in concentration as she tipped her drink higher.

_Aw, shit._

And then there was Felix, his face set in that same determined shape he used when he took on any other menial task. Sylvain gave Lorenz one finally conciliatory pat before shrugging himself free to approach them. 

“Pwah!” Ingrid relented first, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as she looked gloomily at her half-filled bottle.

“Go, Caspar!”

“Hey!” Ingrid chided Ashe’s lack of house loyalty, which made him turn ever-pinker. Mercedes, suddenly distracted from her serenade, giggled at his side.

“Felix,” Annette cried out, hands balled into fists, “you can do it!”

There was no doubt that he could. He was frustratingly good at that sort of thing — doing what he was told just to spite whoever had been foolish enough to give him the order. But, Sylvain knew, a worry wiggling itself free at the base of his spine, he was also completely useless in the fine art of intoxication. He’d seen him lured into near-dead slumber with two simple glasses of wine. He certainly didn’t want to test his resolve now, and particularly not with fucking _Caspar_ lurking at his side.

“Gah!” Caspar’s shoulders hitched as he sputtered. He spilled the dredges of his bottle — amber, by some miracle ale instead of wine— into his lap and cried out in defeat. Felix made a little gasping sound as he finished his off more cleanly. He looked immensely pleased with himself in that near-imperceptible sort of way of his.

“What?” He barked the question at him, which made Sylvain laugh. It was the perfect response: exactly what he would have expected from him if they hadn’t been drug through hell for five long years. Felix maintained his glower as Sylvain sat beside him, borrowing some of the revelry from their audience as Felix was congratulated for his victory.

Stragglers from the room rejoined their circle again, their various gossip and feats of strength forgotten.

“How does it feel,” Annette asked him suddenly from across the huddle, “to be a margrave?” He knew she really meant to ask the question to Felix instead, but that poor girl had never had the courage to ask him much of anything without some subterfuge. But at least they were all drunk enough not to offer Sylvain any consolatory rubbish about his father’s death. He shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly.

“Not much different than being the village idiot.” Ingrid snorted. 

“Let us hope that you still remember how to read,” Lorenz retorted, clearly still tender from his recent defeat.

“I hear that Gautier has managed well,” Annette continued, determined to seek out whatever it was she was hunting for. “It seems to me that you’ll earn yourself some well-deserved rest.”

“I doubt that,” he replied. “Between Sreng and the lords’ council I’m sure I’ll be quite miserable.”

“_Busy_,” Lorenz corrected him with a sniff, “with your duties, of which you have a responsibility to satisfy.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t find me satisfying?” Lorenz’s face pinched into thoroughly disturbed expression. 

“Do you think that you’ll marry?” He choked on his mouthful of wine.

“_Annie_!” Mercedes gasped the name between a fit of giggles.

Perhaps her subterfuge wasn’t as sophisticated at that hour of the night.

His eyes darted quickly to Felix. The man looked as unflustered as usual, busy not with their conversation but with the task of peeling the label from one of their discarded bottles. His long fingers made neat work of it, showing no sign of the dizzying buzz that had started to cloud Sylvain’s own mind.

“Erm,” he replied, knowing full well that the question wasn’t truly pointed at him at all.

“I don’t think there’s a need for any of us to rush to that sort of thing,” Ingrid interceded benevolently.

“Hardly,” Lorenz tutted. “Surely you understand the importance of stability in a time like this?”

“And where is your betrothed, then?” It was Leonie — newly arrived from her post clearing the Empire’s last remnants in the Throat — who posited the question with a tidy dose of venom. Lorenz turned an unexpected beetroot shade.

“That — that isn’t — that isn’t the point.”

“I think His Majesty may extend an offer to our sweet Marianne,” Mercedes offered conspiratorially. Sylvain felt his brows raise with a mind of their own. “How lovely, don’t you think?”

“_Marianne_?” Ingrid scoffed at his surprise.

“You really do only have eyes for yourself, don’t you? If you’d bothered to notice, you would have seen that she’s been at His Grace’s side since she arrived in Faerghus.”

Sylvain hummed noncommittally.

“And what about you, Felix?” Annette had finally struck her bullseye. They all braced for his biting reply, wincing at Annette’s naïveté, and were shocked silent by the shrug of his wordless reply. For some reason the gesture made him look small and pouting, like a little boy who had been asked just what the reason was that he’d refused to play along nicely.

“Well,” Annette stammered, “not that I... that is, if—”

“A toast to our duchesses, then,” Caspar interjected. It seemed to fill them all with a sigh of relief. “And to countesses and marquesses and ‘esses all around.” They snatched up their half-filled tankards and bottles and clattered them together at the center of their circle.

Annette shrunk miserably behind her drink as they fell into a collection of slurring conversations again. Sylvain began some mindless banter with Ingrid and Ashe and did his best to shrug off the pinch born from watching Caspar come to Felix’s rescue.

Then again, maybe the once-imperial deserved a moment of recognition. Sylvain hadn’t seen that emerald-haired companion of his all evening, and Byleth had also suspiciously disappeared. He remembered some passing mention Felix had made years before that the mage intended to make a victim out of the now-archbishop. It nearly made him pity him.

Nearly. Very close to nearly.

His mind began to wander even though he was the one telling the bawdy jokes that were making Ashe cringe. It focused instead on the warmth of Felix’s body at his side. He’d been leaning towards him slowly since he’d first sat, and with such slight, incremental shifts that the average man may have overlooked them entirely. A particularly lecherous punchline, however, made even him laugh, and with it his shoulder finally planted itself against Sylvain’s chest.

The rare sound of the swordsman’s laughter emboldened the rest of them to share their own ridiculous riddles and half-true stories. Sylvain left them to it and settled into a quiet round of drinking. Felix seemed to listen for a while, but soon his chin had bobbed against Sylvain’s collar. Sylvain shifted his arm in its plant behind his back so that he didn’t topple over as he drowsed.

_Honestly_, he thought. Men from the north were supposed to boast and fight when they were drunk, not simply fall asleep. He peeked down at the flush that had spread across the once-pale skin of his crooked nape and did a miserable job at hiding a grin. Ingrid caught it and shot him one of her own from across the circle.

“Right,” he announced to no one in particular, “I yield. Bed.” Most of them had submitted to the idea already, although he certainly wasn’t interested in sprawling across the marble like they had — after all, he’d won the right to not have to sleep on the damned ground any longer.

He set his empty bottle aside and waggled his arm. “Felix. Hey.”

“Nnn,” Felix replied.

“Just carry him,” Ingrid insisted in a raspy whisper as she watched Felix slump bonelessly against Sylvain’s shoving. “He’ll _hate_ it.” Sylvain laughed beneath his breath. She did know how to build a convincing argument, didn’t she?

He wrestled himself to his feet (pausing as the earth lurched more than he’d anticipated — so maybe he’d been a bit too generous with his own servings as well) and fiddled with Felix’s stubborn limbs until he’d managed to haul his arms over his shoulders. With a _hup!_ he slipped one of his arms under Felix’s leg and then the other until he’d secured the shorter man against his back.

“Don’t fall,” Ingrid laughed as he staggered forward. Maybe that would at least wake him up, he considered, but he grit his teeth instead and nodded. He winked at her as he made his escape towards the nearest corridor. The simple smile she offered him back in reply was... nice.

Celebrating with all of them had been nice, too. _Nice_, his dreamy mind stuttered as he slowly mounted a set of stairs: _nice was nice_.

“Schvan,” Felix agreed in his sleep. Sylvain shivered slightly as he felt him nuzzle a spot behind his ear.

“Oop,” he gasped as he nearly careened into a nearby corner. Felix’s fingers slowly twitched to life in their dangle against his chest. 

“Sylvain,” he accused less dreamily.

“Sorry.” Sylvain sucked in a breath before making his attempt at another set of godforsaken steps. “You’re fucking heavy, Felix.” Felix’s laugh rumbled against his back. That felt nice, too.

“You smell—”

“Gee, thank—”

“—good.” He took a pause to readjust his grip and chuckled at the unexpected compliment.

“What do I smell like?” He felt his nose trace the side of his neck. His breath was hot, like always. It was distracting.

Like always.

“You,” Felix murmured cryptically. Sylvain laughed, borrowing some of Felix’s warmth to spread inside the depths of his chest.

“Okay.” They rounded the final corner onto the door of his borrowed room. He couldn’t quite remember where Felix was supposed to sleep, but he was hardly going to make the journey to find out.

“I can stand,” Felix whined as he struggled with the knob, nearly dumping him to the ground as he did.

“Sure you can.” Maybe he could. He didn’t want to give him the opportunity to try. It was nice to be able to rein him in like that: to feel, just for a moment, that nothing — no curious maids making the midnight rounds, nor straggling revelers, or archbishops or kings — could separate them. He knew somehow that it would become a fleeting thing.

The door finally swung open. He tumbled inside to deposit Felix on the bed with a _whumph_. He kicked the door behind him closed and made certain to turn the lock. In the meantime Felix had managed to shrug off a boot and unbutton two of his shirt buttons (curiously, not ones in a line).His dark hair had spilled across the bedding as well, approaching long again after so many years of cutting it into uneven lengths with the edge of his sword.

He had the look of a cat wrestling free from a net as he struggled with his next button. He also looked... perfect. It had always been that way, hadn’t it? After all, Sylvain looked like a Gautier, and Gautiers looked like northmen. Without his fine clothes he could practically disappear in the crowds of one of their frontier markets. He’d always had a suspicion that it was (beside the Crest, of course) one of the reasons why he’d been so successful with women: he wasn’t ugly, naturally, but he was familiar. Comfort food.

But Felix had always been different. With his pale skin and dark hair he’d always looked like he was something rare and untouchable. People — men, women — had always been drawn to him, and the fact that he haughtily rebuffed them had only heightened the effect.

Well, he’d rebuffed most of them, at least.

Sylvain swallowed a jealous breath as he stepped closer to the bed. Felix had finally finished with his buttons. He tossed his shirt unceremoniously to the floor before turning to the laces of his trousers. The look of his intense concentration broke Sylvain’s own musing, made him laugh.

“What are you doing? You don’t need to rush.”

“‘M hot,” Felix complained miserably. That didn’t seem possible. The palace, like all palaces, was freezing even under the sun. Sylvain sat beside him on the bed and swatted his clumsy hands away to assist him with the challenge of undressing.

Freed, Felix’s fingers sailed upwards to fiddle with Sylvain’s buttons instead. He let them, charmed by the way one of his brows had ticked with focus into a crook shape. Felix was very nearly honest with him in that moment, he realized: he still had that bitter little scowl of his, but his drinking had chased away most of his usual facade.

It was more intoxicating that anything he could find in the palace cellars.

Sylvain relented to bend forward and kiss his bared throat. Felix’s hands slipped from their spot to skirt around to his back to press and knead. Every part of him had become so familiar to him — the shape of his collarbones, the planes of his chest, the hitched way he breathes when Sylvain crouches over him like this — and yet he yearned for it as desperately as the first time he’d finally caught him.

“Fuck,” Sylvain gasped as he broke away. “I love you so fucking much.”

His words did not have their intended effect. He watched, confused, as Felix’s face darkened into an unreadable shape.

“What?” His voice was still a ragged whisper. “What is it?”

“You’ve never said that before.”

“What?” Sylvain parroted the word, his brow furrowing incredulously. “Of course I have.”

“No. Never,” Felix insisted. His stare made Sylvain’s heart thrum against his chest.

“Well,” he stammered, suddenly conscious of every letter as it crossed his tongue, “I do.” He realized the implication of what Felix had said with a sinking feeling. “Do you?”

Felix’s lips flattened into that crooked shape that meant that he was embarrassed. It was a mean look but Sylvain was thrilled by it, his fledgling doubt quickly extinguished 

“Yes,” Felix answered lowly, his eyes darting away. Sylvain chased after them, pressing his lips against the bow of his neck again.

“Say it,” he pleaded. “Come on. I want to hear it, too.” Felix’s voice rumbled stubbornly in his throat.

“...you,” he managed finally, his body tense beneath him. “Love you.” Sylvain laughed.

“Say it again.” His lips trailed lower, and with his fingers dragging in their wake as Felix shivered under their ministrations. He complied. The words echoed over and over, first in reluctant whispers and then gasps and moans, until they’d lost their meaning.

It was nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this chapter wasn’t too unoriginal, but I couldn’t help but take a little break from the usual gloom’n’doom... Felix has to catch a break from time to time, right???? 
> 
> The next update will start the final arc of this fic, which will be the postgame storyline that I had originally intended to write before getting totally carried away with the set-up, ha! 
> 
> Thank you so much for all of the clicks/comments/kudos, I really appreciate each one!!


	8. Minuet

They rode from Fhirdiad with the turning of the season. In the north, where the mornings were always chilly and the evenings always cold, summer was marked only by the cherry trees that bloomed beneath its gentle sun. With their pale petals blanketing both roadsides and ruined villages alike it was easy, if only briefly, to forget the war. 

At first they rode as a great company filled with troops once promised to three different banners. Soon after, however, the men and women who had once hailed from a land named Leicester returned east (with the exception of Marianne who, much to Mercedes’ clever prediction, remained behind with her royal betrothed), and those who had been promised the spoils of the old Empire traveled south to seize them.

And then it was only Gautier and Fraldarius and Galatea that remained. Most of the soldiers who had accompanied them in their victory march had already long returned home to begin to rebuild what remained of their peacetime livelihoods. There was something sweetly nostalgic in their riding together, as if they were still just children feigning a grand campaign astride horses imagined from branches and broom handles.

Moreover, it required far less night-time sneaking now that they were largely alone. Not that Felix imagined they were so terribly furtive to begin with. Even he had seen that knowing way that Mercedes had bid them farewell from the steps of her newly-painted orphanage in the capital. Perhaps that was why poor Annette had abandoned her own efforts at... well, whatever it was that she was attempting to do to him, too.

Still, they all felt compelled to lie and laugh it away, Mercedes and Annette included. That was how it had always been: an uncomfortable clearing of one’s throat when asked about stubborn aunts and uncles that never seemed to find the proper partner amidst a dozen proposals.

Perhaps it was easier among commoners whose dowry was no more grand than a set of tarnished silverware. But territory was not a well-beloved quilt, after all: and neither were its people, who were so often thrown into selfish civil wars when the question of noble succession was broached.

Which was, of course, the problem.

And it was also why he found it so difficult to fall asleep, no matter how tempting it was in his place nestled at Sylvain’s side inside his crowded tent. Sylvain himself had been peacefully drowsing for hours, exhausted from their day’s ride and his riding from when the sun had set as well. Felix felt a despicably bashful feeling build inside his chest as he turned to his side to watch him sleep.

Sylvain looked younger again now that they’d had the chance to eat the rich things that had filled the hollows in their cheeks. It was another trick to let Felix think that perhaps there hadn’t been a war at all, and that they were simply naive students still frittering away their days. The only difference was that when Sylvain smiled now he wasn’t as apt to lie.

That made Felix feel bashful, too.

“Mngrh,” Sylvain muttered indelicately, catching his stare. He yawned and rubbed at his eyes. “Can’t you sleep? Is it because I look so handsome?” That bashful feeling crumbled quickly into annoyance (albeit charmed). Felix rolled his eyes.

“Something like that.” Sylvain’s chest rumbled with quiet laughter.

“It wouldn’t kill you to compliment me from time to time,” he teased, looping his arm around his waist. “Honestly, its cruel for you not to. I’ll wither away.”

“I want to talk to you about something.” Sylvain’s lazy smile flickered, half with the disappointment of their bickering having been cut short and half with concern at how unusual it was for Felix to say anything like that. Felix felt a cold knot fold inside his stomach.

“Alright.” Sylvain rubbed his knuckles against his eyes again to urge himself more properly awake. “What is it? Is everything alright?”

“I spoke with Ingrid when we were in Fhirdiad. About her territory,” he added when Sylvain pursed his lips to make some joke about the novelty of speaking with Ingrid. “It seems that a number of Galatea’s minor lords have been suggesting the prospect of new blood for the countship.”

“How generous of them,” Sylvain noted sourly, “after everything she’s done to protect them.” Felix nodded.

“Still, if any of them were half decent I think she would have humored them.”

“But they’re just the same old nasty bastards that you can find anywhere.” He nodded again.

“She won’t just abandon her people to something like that, not after everything that’s happened. But it’s not like she has much to barter.” Felix felt suddenly small under Sylvain’s gaze. It wasn’t like him to talk like this — at length and nearly diplomatically. They both knew it. He sucked in a deep breath and forced it through his lips before he lost the nerve.

“We’ve discussed it,” he continued, eyes darting to their crumpled sheets, “and it seems that the most reasonable approach would be to annex Galatea into the duchy. As you know, the b—-Di— the _King_ has already folded Conand into our borders, so it would be an easy enough thing to redistribute the territory. There aren’t so many loyalists left there, after all, and the land is far more fertile.” One of Sylvain’s brows ticked high into his forehead, no doubt perplexed by their sudden foray into agricultural management.

“Through marriage,” Felix managed finally. “Annexation through marriage.” Sylvain’s other brow rose to meet its neighbor.

“Marriage... between you and Ingrid?”

“Yes,” Felix answered, sounding a bit more miserable than he’d intended. “It’s not as if it will be the first time that something like this has been proposed, and you remember how pleased everyone was with it before. And now that we’re, well, Fódlan, its only natural that things will begin to consolidate. It will be impossible to manage so many individual territories otherwise.”

“There is nothing quite as romantic as land redistribution,” Sylvain agreed with a grin. The gesture made Felix’s heart throb pitifully.

“So... that is the idea.” Sylvain studied him quietly. Felix wasn’t certain just how to read his look.

“Are you asking for my permission?” Felix felt his lips pucker into a shape that may have very nearly been a pout.

“Would it be so ridiculous if I was?”

“It’s all ridiculous, Felix. It also sounds like Ingrid’s idea. When was the last time you talked about matchmaking? Or even the first?” He stared hotly at the sheets again. “But I’ve never been very good at telling Ingrid no. As long as you know that she’s taking advantage of you.”

“We are taking advantage of each other in exactly the same degree,” he insisted tightly. Sylvain laughed.

“That does sound like marriage, then.” He stretched his arms above his head with the feline arch of his broad back. “Honestly, I’m a little jealous I didn’t come up with the idea first. We have shit fields too, you know.” An icy, longing ache settled low inside him. Yes, and how much simpler it would have been if it had just been an alliance between their houses instead.

“You don’t oppose it, then?” Sylvain pinched the bridge of his nose with a put-on sigh.

“As Margave Gautier,” he announced haughtily, “I do have some concerns with your hoarding of resources. It hardly seems fair. Old Dima was already playing favorites with Conand, you know.” Felix’s eyes narrowed into a glare, although he didn’t dispute it. “But who I am to stand in between true love?”

“_Sylvain_.”

“It’s fine, Felix. I think it’s a good plan. Besides, Ingrid deserves a break from all of her proposals. I hear that Earl Jalousie made her an offer while we were in the capital. He’s seventy-two, you know, and it’s not as if he doesn’t look it, that poor old bag.” Felix frowned. Sylvain did that when he was uncomfortable — chatter away.

_Better to get on with it, then_, he thought miserably.

“There’s another part to it.” Sylvain’s brows bounced high again.

“What? Do you intend to take _two_ wives?”

“I would prefer none,” Felix insisted. “And I’ll hardly have one now. But I don’t want to be... _dishonest_ with you.”

“What is it?” Sylvain’s voice had grown low and unexpectedly serious. Maybe he’d caught scent of what he meant to say next. Felix felt more miserable than ever — perhaps more than he ever had before.

“This — between Ingrid and I — it’s purely political. Obviously.”

“That, or that this has become a bit more complicated,” Sylvain interjected dryly, gesturing at their bodies intertwined. Felix felt his cheeks turn insufferably warm. _This _is_ complicated_, he wanted to insist, but maybe nothing was complicated through the lens of that cocky mind of his.

“But there was once — you remember when I was a squire.”

“I remember... What are you getting at, Felix? I remember plenty of things, you know. I remember when you were afraid of horses, too, and when you decided that you’d wear your jacket backwards as some kind of fashion statement until your father nearly lost his mind.”

“I’m serious,” Felix snapped. He watched the playful look on Sylvain’s face dissolve.

“Well, then tell me, because I don’t know what to do with my anticipation.”

“I slept with her,” he spat, fully flustered by Sylvain’s prodding. “Not now. As a squire.”

“Ingrid?” Her name came out in a high tone. Felix fought the incredible urge to hide his face in his hands. “_Our_ Ingrid?”

“Yes.”

“And slept... as in...?”

“Yes, Sylvain!” He wasn’t certain if the bewildered look plastered on his face was pitiable or infuriating.

“Well... was it... _why_?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned, shaking his head. “It was a disaster. I didn’t see her again until we enrolled at the Officer’s Academy, and you know how insistent she usually is on keeping in touch.” Sylvain nodded but seemed otherwise thunderstruck. “Suffice to say that the impulse will not be repeated.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

It was a good question. To be honest, he wanted nothing more than to burrow into their mess of pillows and blankets and disappear.

“Because I don’t want you to think that I’m... entering into a relationship that doesn’t exist. And I know that if you learned it from someone else you’d never forgive me for it.” 

“You’re joking,” Sylvain scoffed half-convincingly. “You aren’t the only man to have slept with a woman before, you know.”

“Well, I’ve told you,” Felix replied bitterly. They stewed in silence for a bit longer than perhaps either had intended.

“It’s just that I’m surprised, is all,” Sylvain attempted finally. “I suppose I just always took you to be a bit of a prude.”

“I just sucked your cock.” Sylvain snorted before falling into a more proper spell of laughter.

“I mean, you’re right,” he admitted, rubbing his temples with his thumbs. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” A coyote howled in the distance. They both listened to it and said nothing more for a long while.

“Was she the first person you slept with?” The heat lingering in Felix’s cheeks chased sideways to burn his ears as well.

“What does that matter?”

“I’m just curious, is all.” Sylvain’s eyes settled on him. “She was, wasn’t she?”

“Not everyone was as precocious as you at that age, you know.”

“That’s a big word to use in a time like this.”

“In a time like _what_, exactly?”

“Have you been with other women?” Sylvain ignored the question, his teeth apparently deep in the meat of this new mystery unveiled to him. Felix shut his eyes and sucked in another sharp breath.

“No.”

“So Ingrid was really the one to lure you over, was she?”

“She was just _there_. Is that enough? I told you this in good faith, not to be mocked by you.”

“This isn’t some negotiation,” Sylvain countered, sounding nearly hurt. “And I’m not mocking you.”

To be honest, Felix wasn’t so eager to name just what that dark look was that was lingering in the back of Sylvain’s eyes, although he was quite certain that it was at least part-jealousy.

“Was it difficult for you?” His question surprised him.

“What— sleeping with Ingrid?”

“Well, yes, but no. When you were younger, did you...” Sylvain gestured a shape into the air, as if it was any better at conjuring something that seemed impossible to say. Felix understood it all the same.

“No. It wasn’t like it was some mystery. In any case, Ingrid certainly confirmed it, so there wasn’t much left to worry about.”

Sylvain nodded. Felix wondered if he was supposed to ask him the same question. He didn’t want to know the answer. He knew the man well enough to understand that sex had been, for a good portion of his life, another form of violence — sometimes pointed inwards and in other times bared towards all of those expectations chasing after him. So what did it matter if it was with a woman or a man?

Not that Felix wanted to know just where he fit into such an equation — or how much of his assumption had been based on his own experience.

“Just don’t sleep with her again,” Sylvain finally offered. It sounded absurd. It _was_ absurd, he realized. He nodded instead of saying whatever it was he should have said. 

“Alright. Good, then. Deal.” Felix didn’t answer. Maybe he should have been relieved, but then Sylvain turned on his side to sleep again and Felix saw that in his bare back there was a wall, ready-built and impossible to scale, and so he wondered instead just for whom it was intended. 

* * *

“If I may, Margrave, this is simply a terrible time for travel.” Sylvain rolled his eyes in what must have been count innumerable as he turned towards the stables. It was early — barely dawn. He’d thought he’d planned out his escape perfectly. Lord Colver, a straight-backed if somewhat plump man with a thinning head of grey hair who had been at the heels of Gautier margraves since (Sylvain suspected) time first began, had proven him wrong.

“This is a diplomatic matter, Colver. I can hardly miss the marriage of our two closest allies — to each other, mind you — just because Sreng has decided to be... difficult.”

A line of horse heads perked up from their morning oats to watch him with curiosity as he sauntered into the barn. Today he was hunting out one on the end — a dappled stallion who was both quick and handsome enough to serve as accompaniment to a wedding. Sylvain was relieved to see that the stable boys had already readied his tack. They were, like their master, generally lazy. It was a lucky win.

“All the more reason why your absence would be forgiven,” Colver insisted stubbornly. “And if any man is to understand the importance of protecting the kingdom from the northmen, it is the Shield of Faerghus.”

“That was his father,” Sylvain noted drolly as he patted the stallion’s nose. “And _we’re_ northmen.”

“A son is his father.” Sylvain sighed, closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath.

“And my father would have already drawn blood. Is that what you want me to say? I went to the border, Colver. Shepherds. They were _shepherds_. I’m not going to ride them down just because their flock strayed a little too close to our particular line in the sand.”

“A shepherd will always strike at the wolves who threaten his flock. Who do you suppose the wolves are in this situation?”

“That’s very poetic.” Sylvain led the horse from its stall. “I’m going, but I won’t overstay my welcome. Is that enough? It’s not as if I mean to watch the next duke be made.” Colver’s thick brows twitched at the idea. It was slight, but he was a gossip, after all.

“A guard at the border, at least, Margrave.”

“Fine!” He left him behind to walk into the yard. “Fifteen men, no more. Guarding, not fighting, do you understand? You’ll be the one to answer for it if they go against my orders.”

“Very good, Margrave.” Sylvain rolled his eyes again and slung himself into his saddle. Perhaps he’d trundle Colver up to Sreng himself, leave him in one of their frozen prairies to try his hand at diplomacy. He nudged his horse into a canter and did his best to ignore the holdfast he was leaving behind.

It was all ridiculous. His teeth ground in his jaw as he eased the stallion into a steady pace. Sreng was always difficult. Where he was in any one particular moment hardly mattered to them. What Colver and all of his lordly compatriots truly wanted was to sow division between Gautier and the neighbor whom they felt had been over-dealt with spoils from the war.

But how could he explain that Felix had been given Conand because Dimitri had been impressed that he was the only one brave enough to try and kill him when he’d been a monster? And would they find his answer any more compelling when he told them that Ingrid would be more likely to give birth to a bloody dragon than a son with the young duke’s dark hair? And would they ever pity him if Sylvain was to admit that he simply missed him? Didn’t he deserve a respite after so many weeks of drudgery, locked in his study as they took on the endless work of piecing Faerghus together again?

_He couldn’t_, he answered for himself, and _no_, and _no_, and _no_. Suddenly he wasn’t as surprised about how bitter of a man his father had been. At least the ride ahead of him was short. And, although he supposed it was a particularly well tailored torture to watch the man he loved be married off to another, at least he’d bloody well see him again.

* * *

“Somehow I feel like I’ve lost a bet,” Sylvain admitted with a grin, “and yet I don’t know exactly who to pay.” Lorenz was an interesting mix of annoyed and pleased and mortified. Leonie — his wife, _his wife!_— stood at his side with nearly the same expression.

“Congratulations is what I mean,” he continued smoothly, clicking the delicate flute of his drink against theirs before taking a hearty draw. “I really am sorry that I didn’t make it.”

“Yes, well,” Lorenz sniffed, “I must say I am impressed that it seems as if you are actually doing something up in that frozen wasteland of yours.”

The trio sought out a set of chairs amidst the merriment of the reception. Felix and his bride had decorated the Great Hall of the Fraldarius castle in exactly the way he had expected — _not_, that is to say, other than in crowding it with tables and chairs. There was something so delightfully utilitarian in all of it, although he wasn’t certain that it had left their guests convinced that there was even a shred of affection hidden behind the day’s machinations.

Well. Then again, it _was_ Felix and Ingrid. Perhaps even in another world where they truly did yearn for one another the outcome would have been very nearly the same.

“I heard that old Claude even decided to show his kingly face.”

“Hardly what one would expect in terms of unveiling that whole matter,” Lorenz sighed, although Sylvain caught the proud look hiding behind his triteness, “and needless to say he became the center of attention, as usual.”

“It was wonderful to see him,” Leonie intervened cheerily.

Sylvain glanced into the crowd again. It was filled with familiar faces — old classmates and lords he remembered from his boyhood. All of the latter were bow-backed and silver-haired: or, to put it bluntly, they were all old enough to have been overlooked by the war. The rest of them — sons and daughters and nephews alike all strong enough to wield a sword— hadn’t been so lucky. His stomach sunk. What a conundrum they found themselves within. Certainly the ruined villages and salted fields were a nightmare, but they weren’t quite as complex as the brutal pruning of so many noble family trees.

The attendees’ humming din quieted as a pair of doors suddenly opened to usher the newlyweds into the hall. They were welcomed with a cheer that sent Ingrid into a fit of self conscious giggles. She’d threaded flowers in her hair, itself braided like a golden crown around her temples. It suited her, just like her simple dress — pretty but not overdone, and a sweet cornflower blue instead of the usual white.

Felix, on the other hand, had dressed himself in the expected black of a proper bridegroom. His jacket, well tailored and adorned with the neat gold epaulets and matching cord befit for his station, was tidy, no matter how strange it was to see him in one. It must have been expensive. The cloth had a luster that mimicked the healthy shine of his hair, swept back tight against his temples and looking neat as well. If there was some god of the underworld it might as well have been him: proud and handsome, if a little gloomy, and striking in black-and-white.

He was putting on a good show of being well-behaved. He smiled at the old cronies who had rushed forward to congratulate him; kept his posture straight, head nodding at the right angle to be polite but not cringing; maintained the touch of his fingertips against Ingrid’s elbow to keep her at the right distance at his side. 

“To the Duke and Duchess!” The room was filled with twinkling glasses raised in their honor. In the toast hung a weighty promise for the future. They were the next generation in the eyes of those tired old men left behind. A new Faerghus— no, a new Fódlan, and united beneath a storied king resurrected from the dead.

Sylvain smirked and drained his glass.

* * *

“Ah. Fuck.” 

If there was a goddess, as so many of his compatriots were convinced, and if that goddess had bestowed some sort of righteousness to the idea of matrimony, then Felix supposed that he was truly a damned and despicable man.

“Yes. _Sylvain_ — like that.”

Then again, the mathematics were already against his favor for everything else he’d done, so why bother with keeping track?

He was distracted by the sound of his fine jacket scuffing and tearing against stone. Sylvain ignored it to instead hike him higher against the wall. A groan growled unbidden from the bottom of Felix’s throat as his strong hands worked him into a contorted pose. In a world not so far away from the dark corridor they’d hidden themselves in, he could hear a group of revelers singing some patriotic song.

“Shit,” Sylvain gasped, his voice ragged and whispered, “you’re so fucking tight.”

“Shut up.” It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to hush him. His wedding vows had only been so convincing to begin with, and he damn well didn’t want to invite any of his guests for an encore featuring the far more believable moans he was half-stifling now. This time he pressed his fingers tight against Sylvain’s lips to emphasize the order.

“What did you expect? You... _fuck_... you’ve been hiding in that fucking holdfast of yours for weeks.”

“You missed me.” He could feel his mouth turn into a sly smile beneath his fingertips. _Fucking asshole._ Not that he’d expected him to keep quiet. But not that he’d expected him to be a proper fucking margrave, either, the fucking...

He shivered as Sylvain’s tongue chased his fingers into his mouth. _Shut up_, he wanted to snap at him again.

“Yes,” he groaned instead. He felt the edges of Sylvain’s teeth against his fingers. They ground closer together as his pace quickened. Felix heard the crunch of his cheap wedding band between the cadence of their gasping breaths. _It doesn’t matter_, he thought as he imagined the thin gold ring, _it was just for show_. He’d already planned to hide it in some drawer as soon as the day was over. 

_Swallow it_, a different voice inside him demanded.

His fingers broke free as Sylvain lurched closer. He didn’t bother to replace them. The man’s voice had broken into a desperate and wordless panting that wasn’t much of a threat. Felix gripped his shoulders as he felt him throb and pulse inside him. His eyes focused blearily on the dented band.

_Swallow it_, he thought again as Sylvain kissed him sloppily. A final wanting noise rumbled in Felix’s throat as he imagined the little golden oval seeding itself inside him. Maybe that was how they all felt, he wondered drunkenly, shuddering with exhaustion as they both slung themselves to the floor.All of those grooms desperate for a bloody sheet to wave outside their windows. Conquest. Proof. _Something_.

Sylvain made a satisfied sound and brushed his lips against his jaw before turning away to fiddle with his buttons. Felix did the same and finished by shrugging off his jacket. The rough stone cladding the corridor’s walls had done little favor to its fine cloth. He fingered the shredded shoulders and wondered just what it meant to be left with nothing but a ruined jacket on a night like that. 


	9. Devil with a Deal

The secret to Sylvain’s particular method of managing his emotions was to let most everything slide off his back. It wasn’t that he meant to foreswear emoting entirely. After all, Felix’s misanthropy seemed exhausting. On the contrary, Sylvain was more often full of feelings than free of them. Things that were annoying annoyed him. When he heard a joke he laughed shamelessly, and even if it wasn’t terribly witty. Sad stories made him teary eyed. Rude affronts and stupid mistakes made him curse with anger. But he was very rarely swept up by an emotion to the point that he couldn’t bite it back. In fact, he could count the times he’d been overwhelmed by untidy emotions on one hand, and with a few fingers to spare.

This was, without question, one of those moments; and, if it were owed one of those fingers it would most definitely be a thumb.

“I told you,” he snarled, “that those men were meant to be a guard and nothing more.”

“Margrave,” Colver stammered, looking positively stupefied by his master’s fury. “There was nothing else to be done. Sreng was the one to take the offensive. Our men were simply defending themselves.”

“Against what? Sheep?” He swept the collection of maps and pens and trinkets from his desk with a brusque shove of his arm. Colver shrunk back against the study’s closed door.

“This is their way, my lord — the Sreng are savages. Surely you cannot intend for your people to let themselves be ravaged by them?”

“Ravaged?! I _intend_ , Colver,” he replied icily, the man’s name a burr against his tongue, “to stop my people from scrambling into another fucking useless war. Or will you be the one to tell them to take up arms again? It will have to be little boys this time — and better that their mothers follow along with them so that they can wipe their noses for them before they have their insides strung out. Or is it that you _intend_ to fight the Sreng yourself?” Colver winced. Sylvain barked a humorless laugh. “No. Of course not. You never have before. Why on earth would you start now?”

“I have served Gautier for my entire life, Margave,” he insisted shakily. Sylvain kneaded his fingers into the sockets of his eyes, summoning what patience he had left to stop himself from wrapping them around the old man’s throat instead.

“Yes, and thank fucking goodness for that.”

“My lord, I insist that you—”

“_Insist_? I know that I wasn’t father’s most attentive apprentice, but I wasn’t under the impression that you were in the position to do much insisting.”

Colver’s eyes darted to the carpet. He was angry. Sylvain could see his temper lurking beneath his cowardly cringing. No doubt that his rheumy-eyed contemporaries shared the sentiment. But of course they did — war was always a profitable enterprise for lords like them, too old to serve and with their heirs conspicuously absent from the frontlines as well.

Well, he wasn’t going to fucking play along.

“My lord?” Colver trailed after him as he stormed through the door. It was perhaps the bravest thing he’d ever done. Sylvain did not reward him with a response.

“Ready my horse,” he snapped instead to a lanky boy standing at the gates lining the stables. The boy — his name stared with a J, what was it? — turned red as he dashed into the stables and away from the margrave’s mood. Sylvain watched his retreat with a sinking feeling. He wasn’t a good stablehand. None of them were. They weren’t trained for it. The ones that had shown a natural talent for horses were all already dead and buried.

A war with Sreng. What the fuck were they thinking?

“Margrave,” Colver attempted again. “Please. We must discuss our next steps.”

“Our discussion is finished. Tell the council that I’ve taken their advice into consideration.” A second boy — no, this one was a girl — materialized to hand him his riding gloves. _Right_. Marjorie was her name. She was better than the boy — had warmed the leather against a fire before bringing them to him. Bless her. He wondered if he could name her a lady in that very moment and grant her Colver’s despicable post instead.

Not that he would be that cruel to her. He smiled with appreciation as he flexed his stiff fingers. She blushed and bowed her head, thumbing a strand of hair behind her ear as he stepped into the yard.

“Into consideration, my lord? And to what end?” The brief respite of Marjorie’s kindness quickly turned to anger again.

“To Sreng. To speak with them — like people, not like the fucking dogs you find it so convenient to mistaken them for.” Colver opened his mouth to reply, found no words to speak, closed it again. Sylvain rolled his eyes and strode forward to seek out his horse.

* * *

When he’d been a boy, Sylvain’s father had occasionally told him stories about how the first Gautiers had once adventured in the snowy north. At the time he’d been charmed by the attention and hadn’t thought much about the reason why, exactly, they had been there to begin with. The answer was much more clear to him now as he carefully made his way across the border. 

It wasn’t that they had ventured north, he‘d realized, as much as they had snuck south. He rode past camps and little windswept villages that were filled with towering red-haired men and women that were either the result of a very admirable forefather or proof, more believably, that Sreng had more in common with Gautier than just its propensity for violence. Perhaps that was why they watched him pass without deigning to stop him. More likely that they were just waiting until he was deep enough in the peninsula to be killed without sending a pesky call for help first.

Well. No matter. In any case, their apathy at his arrival meant that he wasn’t dead just yet and, even better, that no one else would have to die for him either. The land itself was flat and easy if eerily barren. He rode without incident until he came upon what he was looking for.

The majority of the Sreng people were nomads — and of course they were, that rocky soil of theirs didn’t offer much in terms of an alternative. They depended on their flocks and followed after them as they roved to graze (including, most recently, too close to Gautier’s borders).

However, there were some exceptions to the rule. The most notable of them was the city of Kalang. Filled with round-walled structures made from animal skins and arranged without the pretense of proper streets it wasn’t recognizable when compared to places like Enbarr or Fhirdiad, but it didn’t make Kalang any less likely to be their king’s seat.

Sylvain’s gamble had paid off. The man was waiting for him himself at the city’s rudimentary wall, no doubt alerted by the scouts who had been lazily trailing him since he’d first crossed over. Of all of them he looked most like some long-lost uncle: tall and broad-shouldered with a bald head and a red beard that nearly covered his generous stomach. He was alone and picking at his teeth when Sylvain’s destrier came to an ambling halt before him.

“King Yulus,” Sylvain greeted him from his saddle. The man looked up and spat something between his horse’s hooves. Sylvain waited as he looked him over.

“And who are you supposed to be?”

“I am Margrave Sylvain Jose Gautier of Fódlan.”

“Margrave Gautier,” Yulus echoed, nodding with appreciation. “Of Fódlan. You seem a little short in the tooth for that. The last margrave I broke bread with had white hair, and if my memory serves me right he was from a place called Faerghus, not Fódlan.”

“My father often told me of your—”

“Don’t,” Yulus cut him short with the wave of his paw-like hand. “You mean to say _friendship_ or something along those lines, don’t you? That’s how you southerners like to talk — all lies and sweet nothings. Your father killed my people for years and I’ve paid him back for it with plenty bones of my own. I don’t doubt that the old bastard told you all about me, but don’t think that I’m foolish enough to think that any of it was with bloody admiration. Or do you think that I was drinking to your father’s memory with my own children when he froze to death in that miserable old stone cave of yours?”

“Let us speak plainly, then. I have come here to discuss the recent skirmish at the border.” Yulus barked a laugh.

“Skirmish? Is that what you call cutting down a pair of shepherd’s boys not old enough to grow hair between their legs? Speak plainly indeed!”

“Winter has been harsh for years,” Sylvain insisted. “There is no need for our people to leave their fields to fight one another.” Yulus shrugged.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps I’ll plant your skull instead and see if something pretty grows.” Sylvain frowned. That made Yulus laugh again. “You bloody southerners. Look at you, sitting up there and speaking down to me like I’m just another one of your groveling lords. I’m a king, eh? And what are you? A glorified ranger keeping watch over a useless piece of land. Harsh winter indeed. They’re always harsh, you mindless donkey.”

“You refuse to parlay, then?” Sylvain’s chest grew tight as he watched Yulus turn his back to him.

“Well now, I haven’t said that either, now have I?” Yulus shouted something in a language he didn’t understand. Sylvain tensed as a pair of men suddenly appeared from inside the city. A tall black stallion followed between them. The king took its reins and led the creature towards him. “Come on, then. Ride with me. If you can sit a saddle as well as you can be a fool then perhaps I’ll give you my ear.”

They rode hard. Sylvain imagined that he meant to toss him from his saddle and leave him broken-backed to freeze an uncomplicated death. In what must have been a disappointing turn of events for the nomad king he made a good show of keeping pace. They raced through miles of pebbly steppe, their horses darting between granite boulders left behind by glaciers in a different age, and didn’t slow even as a few gnarled evergreens began to wrestle themselves from the earth. It was exhausting but he kept his eyes steady on the man’s bald head like a hound chasing after a hare.

Yulus and their horses both had been worked into a lather by the time they’d circled back on Kalang again. The king was already laughing when he dismounted, wiping his brow with his sleeve as he watched Sylvain dart from his saddle.

“You’re not a bad rider,” the older man observed as he snatched a wineskin from a nearby woman dressed in motley furs. “Too skittish, but you young ones generally are.”

Sylvain nodded and rubbed his hands together. Yulus might have been ruddy faced himself from their chase, but he was just fucking cold. He noted also, bemused, that there was no auburn-haired maiden ready with a drink for him as well.

“If we’d gone any farther I think we would have killed the horses.” Yulus laughed.

“Yours, maybe.” He shoved the skin into his hands. “Come on. You’re looking blue. We’ll find a fire and have that talk you’re so worried about.”

He followed in the giant’s wake as they made their way to the city’s crowded heart. Much like before, its inhabitants largely ignored him as he passed them by. Yulus garnered a collection of appreciative shouts and calls, of course, but Sylvain himself seemed to disappear in his shadow. There was something unsettling in it. He uncorked the skin and took a draw, his face pinching at the bitter, fiery stuff inside.

“So, then,” Yulus continued as he ushered him into an unassuming yurt. They both had to crouch against the low ceiling but the fire inside filled it was a warmth that finally teased at the hope of thawing his frozen limbs. “Margrave Gautier. Why did you kill those boys?”

“I had no intention of hurting any man or woman from Sreng,” Sylvain answered with a shake of his head. “Nor do I now. But you know as well as I do that ranging so close to the border is asking for trouble.”

“Tell that to my sheep, then, southern boy. I haven’t learned the trick of it but perhaps they’ll listen to you.” Sylvain realized he was still holding the wineskin. He handed it back to Yulus, who took a hearty draw.

“I am prepared to compensate the boys’ families, naturally,” Sylvain continued. “And I will see to it that the men responsible for their deaths are properly dealt with.”

“What, are you going to gut them like they gutted those boys?” Sylvain frowned.

“They will be dealt with according to our laws, as I imagine you would order if put in my position.”

“Our laws say that a man has the right to kill the man who means to kill him.” Sylvain felt himself being backed into a stalemate. He fought the urge to roll his eyes — stared into the fire between them instead. _Fuck_. Maybe it was easier to go to war after all.

“Kill him,” Yulus added, seemingly amused by Sylvain’s silence, “or call him a brother. It’s a good practice, I think. I’ve done both, tested them, found them both equally satisfying. It was a shame that I couldn’t kill your father, of course, but that man who killed _my_ father, now there is a good brother indeed. You know him, I think. The Shield of Faerghus, you people call him — looks like a big black dog.” Sylvain’s eyes darted back in the king’s direction.

“You mean Duke Rodrigue?” Yulus’ lips pulled into a smile.

“The same. Listen. You bring that wily bastard here to me and I’ll consider your proposal.” Sylvain drew in a deep sigh.

“I apologize if you were not yet aware, but Duke Rodrigue is dead.” Yulus’ smile faltered. It was strange. After all, Rodrigue had earned his moniker because he’d subdued Sreng and taken land from it for good measure. He hardly expected to hear a northman mourn his death, and especially not their king.

“That’s a pity. I would have liked to have seen him again. He was useless on a saddle but he was a brave man. Good at singing, you know that? If there was ever a man who’d bring a tear to my eye it was him with all of those songs of his.” Yulus took another long drink and took his own turn to stare into the fire. “He had sons, eh? Them like you, then, serving in his place now?”

“The younger, yes,” Sylvain answered, finding it nearly absurd to conjure the thought of Felix in a place like that.

“Elder dead?” He nodded. Yulus sighed.

“That’s the way of it. Winters’re harsh, you’re right with that.” Yulus’ dark eyes settled on him. The fire cast deep shadows against his wrinkled brow. Sylvain realized that he was older than the color of his beard would suggest. He looked tired.

“I had two sons. Dumb bastards killed each other. Big strong boys they were — two of them were the only ones who’d been able to put the other down. They were so focused on taking my crown from me that they didn’t put a son into anyone before they died. Now all I have is daughters who are nearly as mean as they were. Ugly as they were, too. It doesn’t seem as though they intend on being mothers, either. All I wanted was to be an old man free to drink and piss himself without having to bother with the rest and yet here I am, a king still, and watching as my people scrap over rocks to throw at your pretty stone houses. Look at me, southern boy. Do I have the look of a man who wants to go to war?”

“Then let us put this mess at the border behind us,” Sylvain quickly offered, his heart hammering with a hopeful twitch. “I am no more eager for war myself.” Yulus’ chest rumbled with a deep hum.

“You’ll steal nothing from me. What I’m proposing is a deal. You give me what I want and I’ll give you what you’re asking for.” Sylvain’s hope withered into dread.

“And what is it that you want?”

“Rest,” the man replied, fanning his palms in the air. “I’ll give you peace if you give me an heir.” His breath died in his throat.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re offering.” Yulus laughed through his nose, his mouth busy with another deep swallow from the wineskin.

“An alliance. Don’t make me think I’ve made a mistake already. You’ve got brains, don’t you? It would be — what’s the word you people use — _politically inconvenient_ to wage war against your wife’s house, isn’t that right? Or are you not that type of thinker?” His eyes glinted in the firelight.

“Let’s try it another way. I’ve got a filly for you. All I expect back is a colt so that these bastards can stop riding me ragged. I know who you are, Sylvain Jose Gautier of Fódlan. You’ve got no woman yourself. Or, listen, if you do, there’s no shame in that. Just be kind to my girl. My daughters can fend for themselves. Good breeding, too. Get two sons from her and I wager you’ll solve some problems for yourself as well.”

“Are you suggesting that I... _sell_ a child to you?”

“Pah! What an imagination you have!” Sylvain’s eyes narrowed at the man’s bellowing laughter. “Makes me wonder if it’s not the first time you found yourself in such an arrangement. No, southern boy, I’m not in that sort of business. Listen to me. I’ll never give you Sreng, not even if you fight me for it. But my daughter’s son will take it. Better him than some traitor here who means to steal it from me. You have the right look for it — not so many men up here with red hair anymore. If he isn’t suited for it nature will take its course. By then I’ll be blissfully dead. But I cannot stomach another fucking discussion about my heir. You’re of the age, you must have some understanding of what I mean to have not wed yourself off already.”

“And if I refuse?” Yulus grinned.

“Well, I’ll take it personally, of course. Bad fucking manners, that. But I’ll also take revenge for those boys you took from us. I wager a Sreng is worth a hundred of your lot. It will be a bloody business.” Yulus tipped the skin high above his head to finish it off. “Consider my offer if you must, but know that I’m not a patient man.”

Sylvain didn’t doubt it. Their harried ride had been proof enough that King Yulus wasn’t satisfied with anything not done at an eye-watering pace.

_Fuck. _

* * *

“This is unacceptable! Oche has been under my family’s care for generations. Its people, its traditions, industry — they are as much a part of my blood as anything! Blood that has been spilled in its protection before!”

“If you are suggesting that you’d prefer to die than to foreswear your position, Count, then I can assure you that this option is available to you,” Felix answered dryly. The hook-nosed lord bristling before his desk shrunk slightly at the idea. To be honest, Felix would have nearly preferred that particular outcome. A year before and perhaps it would have been him to have carried out that very sentence, and not with the neatness of a guillotine but on a bloody field.

Instead he glanced down at the long ledger spread across his desk and sighed. It was full of “Vons” this and that who had once owned pieces of the Empire. Now that same land was being redistributed to the brave allies who had gambled their lives for Dimitri’s victory. The unsavory task had been entrusted to him as the king’s right hand — no matter how valiantly he tried to dissuade him of bestowing him the honor.

Perhaps he should have been proud of it instead. There was no doubt that he was relieved (and endlessly, and more than he’d ever admit aloud) that Dimitri had finally learned the trick of reeling in his base and beastly nature. But although Felix had been eager to bring an end to his role as an executioner in Dimitri’s name, he hadn’t exactly intended to become a bureaucrat in its place.

“This... That is... How do you expect me to feed my family?”

“As a man of means, I’m certain you have plenty of things that would be suited to sell.” Felix’s eyes settled on the fat gemstones ringing the man’s fingers. The once-imperial scowled and balled his hands into fists.

“Outrageous,” he muttered hotly. His eyes darted quickly to meet Felix’s own before lowering again. “You are no different than I, Duke Fraldarius. There was a time that I even shared a table with your father. It is only by chance that you find yourself at that seat of yours and I here, and not the opposite.”

_Lucky for me, then_, Felix thought dryly.

“You have a year to vacate your territory,” is what he said aloud. The count turned red, shook his shoulders, rammed his fists into his thighs — and nodded, wordless, before turning quickly and storming from the room. Felix snatched a pen from his desktop and speared a line through his name upon the parchment with a scratching flick of its nib.

“My lord,” a quiet voice peeped from the door. He looked up and nodded at the woman to enter. She was nearly a double of his wife, although Ingrid was a day’s ride away, left to oversee the duchy while he wasted away in the capital. Birgitta was her name, another one of those solid Galatean words that conjured images of shield-maidens in plate soaring astride pegasi amidst a stormy sky.

He had appointed her as his assistant because she was clever first and foremost, but to be honest it was also reassuring to have an eastern ally who had seen the ravages of the war firsthand instead of all of those frilly-collared aristocrats who’d crowded the palace halls as soon as it’d been safe for them to crawl out of their rat-holes.

She was also, incidentally, Ingrid’s cousin, and the very same golden-haired creature who had once inspired Sylvain to take up kissing lessons.

Not that that mattered.

He fought the urge to rub his eyes.

“That is the last of them for the evening,” Birgitta continued.

“Thank the goddess.” He watched her lips twitch to hide a commiserating smile. “What is it that you have there?” She glanced down at the bundled parcels in her arms.

“Today’s post. If you’d like I can read through it for you, piece out anything important.” He waved away the offer.

“No. It’s alright. You’ve been at this miserable business as long as I have. Go rest.” She nodded and stepped forward to place the mail at the corner of his desk.

“It wouldn’t be a crime for you to do the same,” she suggested. He huffed a breath of dry laughter.

“No, not a crime,” he agreed in that defeated tone of his that meant he wasn’t up for a much lengthier discussion. Birgitta caught it, nodded her head, dipped into the faintest of curtsies despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing a skirt to flutter in his direction.

“Very good, my lord. I wish you a restful evening.”

“Goodnight, Birgitta,” he replied as she made her escape to the life he suspected she must have lived outside his office. He rubbed his temples and reached forward to pick through the letters she’d left behind. It was not a short pile.

One envelope sealed with a familiar dot of wax made his heart jump slightly. He set it aside like a cube of sugar coveted away for the end of a meal. The rest occupied him for far too long. The candles at his side had burned down to short stubs by the time he allowed himself to look over at the final letter again. He traced his fingers over the depression of the crest in miniature suspended in the wax. How typical it was for something that had haunted Sylvain for so long to chase him in that way, turned into something as benign as a seal when it had always been a hex for him instead.

Felix’s mind wandered as he slipped the blade of his letter opener beneath the seal and popped it free. How long had it been since he’d seen him last? Too long. There had been the wedding, of course, and then a set of blissful days some weeks afterwards when they’d managed to escape under the pretense of a hunt before the weather turned too cold.

But now he’d been a married man for nearly a year. They wrote to each other, of course, but even that had become difficult — after all, Felix’s days were full of writing to the point that even writing to Sylvain was a torture, and Sylvain was so occupied with the endless complexities of his border territory that he didn’t seem to have the time to do much anything else at all.

It was better than before. He wasn’t selfish enough to think otherwise. Better for them to be safe, even indentured as they were to their dry responsibilities, than to be sucked into a death march again. And better, too, to be so plain and honest with him as he was now than to be the miserable young man he’d been before, and cursed with hiding his heart from him as Sylvain cavorted recklessly as the monastery’s resident incubus.

But it would have been nice to see him, is all.

He slipped the letter from the envelope and unfolded it along its crisp crimp. A prick of disappointment filled him as he realized it was not a sheet of parchment filled with Sylvain’s chicken-scratch run-on sentences but a tidy stationary adorned with a neat hand instead.

He read it. Read it again. Folded it and stared at the rich grain of the wood that made up his desk. Unfolded the letter and read it a final time. Then he slipped it back into its envelope and sighed and leaned sideways to fish a hidden decanter from one of the deep drawers at his feet.

* * *

Much later — to the point that he’d been forced to rummage through his study to find candles to replace the fizzled-out wicks of his lamp — there was a knock at his door. He meant to chase whoever it was off with a particularly biting reply but was cut short when they simply let themselves in instead. 

“Linhardt,” he snapped as he watched the man saunter towards his desk. He was certain he’d locked the door but that was the trouble with mages, wasn’t it?

“Oh, don’t bother,” Linhardt sighed as he sunk into a leather-bound chair cocked at an angle in front of the desk. “I’ve already had a terrible evening. Let’s save us both some time and skip the usual indignation, shall we?”

Felix smirked and took another drink from his short glass. It wasn’t like he was entirely surprised to see him at that hour. He’d decided that Linhardt was something like a bat, always fluttering about after the sun had set on whatever mysterious mission-_cum_-debauchery he’d assigned himself. What was unusual was to see him looking so miserable. It was, given the circumstances, one of those rare moments were Felix was very nearly keen to empathize.

“What happened, then?” Linhardt perked slightly at his diplomacy (for him, at least) before sinking lower into his chair.

“I’ve been thrown out. Homeless, Hugo! And without a bed to call my own. It’s wretched and thoroughly unfair.” Felix rolled his eyes. Linhardt had somehow managed to carve himself a spot as the kingdom’s least effective minister of some interior matter — he was hardly at risk of sleeping on the streets unless he did it out of some fetish.

“You had a fight with Byleth?”

“Worse,” Linhardt mumbled. “The poor fool has asked me to marry him.” Felix pinched the bridge of his nose. _For fuck’s sake_.

“I wasn’t aware that that was an option,” he replied glibly. Linhardt’s face puckered into a proper pout.

“Don’t be dense. Anything is an option if you’re the head of the church.” For once, Felix wished that he were a religious man himself.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I follow. I thought you loved him?” Linhardt sighed and waved his fingers with a theatric flick in the air.

“He said the same thing. You people are all so naive.” Felix frowned, his patience rubbed thin again. Linhardt caught it. His eyes hooded low, finding some amusement in Felix’s annoyance like he always had before. “Love is just the reward for doing the things that please us. I only do things that please me, dear Duke. I am positively full of love. I love silk sheets. I love a warmth bath. I loved it when you used that scowling mouth of yours on me.” His pout split into a catty grin as Felix rolled his eyes. “But as much as I love love, it doesn’t give me the power to do the impossible.”

Felix emptied the last amber dredges of the decanter into his glass and swirled it around the thick crystal round of its base.

“It’s impossible for you marry Byleth?”

“Of course,” Linhardt replied, as if it were obvious. “I’ve already pledged myself to Caspar, now haven’t I? I may cherish being a cuckold, but it’s not as if I intend to break a vow.” Felix stared bemused in Linhardt’s direction.

“...what? Are you trying to say that you’ve married Caspar?”

“Yes. Have you struck your head? Please do try to follow along.”

“You’ve been fucking the archbishop for over a year,” Felix countered dryly. Linhardt gasped an exasperated breath.

“You know from firsthand experience that I don’t _fuck_ anything,” he corrected him primly.

“Semantics.” Linhardt shrugged. Felix sucked in a deep breath and shook his head. Even he was bewildered enough by the mage’s logic to play along. “How long, then?”

“How long what? Do you mean Bylet—”

“How long have you been married to Caspar?” Felix interjected quickly.

“Why... sixteen years, I suppose.”

“Sixteen.” Linhardt was unruffled by his incredulous stare. “Lin, you’re _twenty-two_.”

“Yes,” Linhardt replied somewhat snappily. “And at six dear Cas came to me and told me that I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen and asked me to marry him. I agreed. I believe you are familiar with the institution.”

“That isn’t how it works.” Linhardt shrugged again.

“We all have our different interpretations of matrimony, now don’t we? I imagine there are some that would propose that you aren’t much of a married man yourself, given that you don’t share your wife’s bed.” Felix felt a dark look shadow his features. It seemed only to thrill Linhardt further. “In any case, now Byleth is quite bitter about the whole matter and won’t let me share his bed either. It’s all terribly cruel.”

“To him. I think he really does love you.”

“There that word is again,” Linhardt sighed. “You know, I _love_ pheasant. Moist, with a crisp skin — delicious. I wouldn’t want to eat it every day.”

“You are not a normal person.” Linhardt laughed.

“No, perhaps not. But I think I may very well be your friend, as loathe as you are to admit it, so give me refuge, won’t you?” His eyes darted to the letter left discarded at Felix’s elbow. “To be honest I’m quite certain that this is all your fault. First _your_ marriage and now _his_ — no doubt that the poor archbishop found himself quite inspired.”

Felix closed his fingers around the hilt of his letter opener and began to spin it against its tip. He did it absentmindedly, his eyes settling on the spindle of its point as it began to bite into the desktop.

“Not that I don’t understand why you did it,” Linhardt continued. “Now that wife of yours can slay to her heart’s content, gods save her. Quite a neat solution for all of your pillow-biting as well. And this matter with Sreng — naturally I don’t know much about that godforsaken place, but I understand that they are rather nasty. Good on the Margrave for his negotiation. Although I must say it _is_ a bit derivative. Was it your idea, then?”

Felix didn’t answer. The sinew of his arms tensed as he pushed harder against the letter opener. It stopped spinning, needled into the grain of the desktop instead. He could feel Linhardt’s eyes on him. He didn’t match them but knew their look: dreamy, all-seeing.

“It wasn’t,” Linhardt guessed. The tip of the letter opener found a seam. He twisted it and felt a sick satisfaction from the pop of the crack that had started to spread across the desktop. “Don’t tell me that you didn’t know.”

Felix fought the intense urge to slash off that smirk of his.

“You’ve only just now found out,” Linhardt wagered more carefully. “And with a wedding invitation, no less. Even for him that seems a bit... unfair.”

“Shut up,” Felix snarled between his teeth. He heard Linhardt sigh. The mage stood from his perch to approach him. Felix tensed in his chair, not entirely trusting himself not to strangle the man where he stood. Linhardt ignored his dark look as he leaned against his desk.

“You know,” he began again, tracing his fingertips along the ropework of the desk’s carved edge, “I’ve always been interested in crests. That’s no secret to you, of course. But the thing that’s really caught my eye is how they change the man who bears them — not with power, mind you, just the little things along the way. For instance, did you know that every bearer of my crest has found themselves drawn to the sea? There are so many ship’s captains in my family tree that it’s honestly a bit uninspired, and not a one of them has drowned despite that being a common end to such a profession.

And then there is the Crest of Flames — inspiring, isn’t it? Almost as if we’re bewitched to follow along with whatever my sweet archbishop has in mind. And your crest.” Felix flinched as he reached forward to brush his hand. “I remember what it was like to lay beside you, you know. To be honest I think about it quite frequently. You were always as hot as a fever. No doubt a handy feature when you live up here in the north.

But they’re not all just parlor tricks, unfortunately. There are some curses thrown in there as well. The Crest of Maurice, for instance — our sweet queen has certainly suffered for it herself. And, of course, the Crest of Gautier. Did you know that six different margraves have all found themselves dead to some chill? Seems a bit strange to me, that men born in the north wouldn’t know the proper way to warm themselves.”

“I’m not interested in a lesson,” Felix insisted sourly.

“You never are,” Linhardt sighed. He crouched and danced his fingers over Felix’s knees. “Half of the time I’m convinced that everything I tell you is wasted breath. And yet I endeavor on — of course, you know me to be a bit of a masochist, so I suppose that isn’t a surprise.” His fingers traced higher on his thighs. He watched them, unmoving.

“But no matter how many men I watch my beloved fuck, I don’t think I’ll ever contend with you. Your Sylvain is ready-made to draw you dry — to suck that heat of yours away until you’re as cold and barren as he is. Is that what compels you to chase after him?”

Linhardt worked the button of his trousers free. His slender fingers were nimble on the laces below it. Felix watched him, full of malice and something sick and wanting, and remembered what it had been like years ago when Linhardt had been in this position before. He’d been good at it — his mouth hot and generous as he sucked him off and watched him squirm with those cobalt eyes of his. Sylvain was a miser in comparison, rare to strike a submissive pose in their lovemaking and quick and clumsy when he did.

“Do you really hate yourself that much?”

Felix stood, leaving Linhardt sprawled and disappointed in his wake.

“You can sleep here,” he replied, not in the snarling voice he had expected but in a tired and resigned tone. Linhardt watched him as he fixed his fly and turned to hunt out the door that led into his private quarters behind the study’s walls. “That’s all I have to offer you.”

Linhardt crossed his arms over the seat of his abandoned chair and lingered in his spot. Felix didn’t wait to see if he had a reply prepared. He closed the door quietly between them, seeing no value in slamming it even if it was deserved. His quarters were dark and quiet and cold just like he’d left them in the morning. 

He was hot. Felt like he was burning alive.


	10. Wither

Sylvain had prepared two dozen perfectly acceptable explanations. Some were surgical, logical, full of words like “mutual gain” and “political leverage”; others were pockmarked with foul language bemoaning his fate. Then there were the ones that left him begging with bruised knees. The best approach, he knew, was a chimera of everything he’d drafted.

_We knew this would happen eventually._

_It’s an opportunity I can’t let slip away._

_Fódlan isn’t ready for another war, not even one fought in the north._

_Maybe it will be easier._

_We just need to find another red-headed man more willing to make a son._

It wasn’t that the words themselves were that difficult to form, just that they always seemed to stick in his throat when he tried to spit them out. In the days after his parlay in Sreng he’d found himself drawn to the duchy. _Get it over with_, he’d thought as he rode south. But then he’d come upon Felix buried in his library, his hair messy and him looking like a little boy desperate to be rescued from his governess, and the words had transmogrified into an invitation out into the countryside instead.

A hunt, he’d proposed, although they’d never done something like that before — not of animals, at least. Felix had looked so relieved at the idea that he hadn’t told him about Yulus’ offer in their ride into the duchy’s dense forest, either. It was rare to see the duke on horseback. He’d always been so stubborn about it. Sylvain was half-convinced that he was still frightened of them. Horses, that is. But there he was, looking neat enough on his saddle and, more importantly, _happy_. Not in an obtuse way, all smiles and pink cheeks, but in his own particular manner that was far more satisfying.

And how could he conjure up the idea of wives when they were together at night? It had been the first time they’d laid together without the pretext of a war or its aftermath. Their replacement of desperation with pleasure had been exhilarating. So he hadn’t told him then, either.

Then their hunt had come to an empty-handed end. Ingrid wasn’t expecting any pelts or trophies, of course; and Sylvain honestly didn’t give a damn just what Colver and his miserable retinue had to say about his excursion. He and Felix had parted at a crossroads with a simple but heartfelt goodbye, and Sylvain certainly hadn’t wanted to spoil the moment with a rushed apology.

_I’ll write to him_, Sylvain thought next as the season turned to winter and thawed into spring again. But each attempt seemed worse — more clumsy, sometimes even cruel. His crooked handwriting only made it more crude. And Felix seemed so miserable caged as he was in the capital to do Dimitri’s bidding. How could he send him something so disappointing in a time like that?

But then Yulus had grown impatient, as he knew he would, and Sylvain had been forced to make a decision. Of course, the matter had all but been decided since it had first been offered, and perhaps both men knew it to be true. _You’ll be married in a year and a season_, the bald-pate king declared: _when the leaves turn the color of my sweet daughter’s hair_.

It had been enough time to convince himself that it would never happen. Colver and the rest of the lord’s council were unconvinced by the deal he’d struck, but the peace that followed after had been enough to keep them quiet. Sylvain focused on rebuilding: reviewing harvest counts, settling petty debates over serfs-turned-lords who meant to take over land lost to houses that no longer had the heirs to inherit them. Felix’s letters told him that he was trapped doing the same, albeit at a mind-numbing scale.

So he didn’t tell him.

He would have to at the wedding. It seemed a good forcing function. Of course it would make him look like a bit of a fool — or a bastard, really, but he’d been both before. Felix would be angry with him. He was prepared for that, too. It wasn’t as if he’d never been angry with him in the past. And perhaps his explanation would need to be a bit more groveling than he’d first planned, but the message would remain the same: _this was inevitable. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything_.

But then Felix hadn’t come.

Portia, Yulus’ sacrificial daughter, had. She arrived in Gautier with a week’s buffer to the their wedding, draped in a thick veil that hid her shape and features from him and accompanied by a small troop of giantesses that were no doubt her sisters. Yulus’ promise about good breeding hadn’t been a lie in the sense that they were certainly robust, although he wasn’t quite sure what their mother could have possibly looked like. The women were the spitting image of their father, as if someone had shorn his long beard and affixed it to his head and hadn’t bothered with much of the rest. _Mean and ugly_, their father had said: well, he wasn’t one to mince words.

Maybe that made it easier. Sylvain wasn’t quite certain. He didn’t speak with his betrothed beyond the appropriate stilted greeting. She replied equally nicely from behind her veils — spoke Fodlanese well, as effortlessly as her father did — before retreating to the quarters he’d prepared for her to then disappear entirely. Maybe he was supposed to sneak into her window to catch a glimpse of her, or to slip a sheet of sweet nothings under her door proclaiming his eagerness for their wedding night.

He did neither and found no sign of her own nocturnal sneaking, either.

The sun was bright and warm on their wedding day despite the late season. Just as Yulus had hoped, the trees ringing the holdfast were in a full fiery display that seemed to glow beneath the cloudless blue of the sky. The hold and the yards outside it were full of revelers curious to see just what it was that a Sreng woman looked like. Whatever it was they were expecting hadn’t been what was beneath those veils.

A gasp — and how rude it had been, perhaps he should have thought, instead of adding his own surprised sound as well — filled the holdfast’s rough-shod chapel as Portia lifted her veils to reveal herself as a petite, womanly creature with a doll-like face and a head of rich red curls that were as beautiful as the autumnal leaves outside. Perhaps her mother hadn’t been a she-bear like the rest of them. And maybe the king of Sreng was more generous than he had at first seemed.

Or, more likely, Sylvain suspected as he did his best to settle his brows into a less bewildered shape, Yulus was simply a pragmatic man who intended to earn his end of their bargain.

His bride captivated their audience for the remainder of the evening. She greeted the lords nicely, somehow trained for the charade, and danced when asked with a smooth waltzing step that quickly charmed her partners. Sylvain didn’t join her, although he knew that it was improper. He was too busy surveying the room in his spot on their raised dais.

There was Lorenz and Leonie and Mercedes and Annette, both women paired with men he didn’t recognize; and Ashe, and Dorothea, even, lured from the opera house and looking at home amidst the silk and cheer after having been named a freshly-minted countess herself. As the night grew later he even saw Ingrid amidst the crowd, her head bowed as she spoke to another blonde who was very nearly her double. He wasn’t certain if she was there out of loyalty or as a punishment.

Felix wasn’t there.

So he started to drink those endless glasses of wine they kept bringing him more earnestly than he’d first intended. It didn’t do anything about that cold space inside his chest, but at least it made all of those faces blur together so that they didn’t seem to be watching him anymore. Not that he’d need to recognize them to know just what it was they wanted. It was always the same, wasn’t it? But at least perhaps his father was turning in his grave to know that the man who had finally sold his daughter to him hadn’t seemed to give a damn about his crest at all.

The wine was red like their hair. It had stained Portia’s lips — little petal-shaped things that turned into a shy shape as her sisters herded her towards him once even the musicians had grown tired. He realized then that the women had been less an honor guard than an insurance plan. His drinking made him complacent. Better for it, really. It would have been quite the scene to shoo them away after ignoring his new wife all evening.

The revelers had cooed and cat-called as the giantesses chased the pair up into the turret that housed his room. With each step he pieced a new word to his excuse, not yet uttered but ready on his tongue: _you’re lovely, dear, but not tonight. Come sleep here and we’ll discuss it in the morning._

But then they’d found themselves alone and she’d already started on the buttons of his jacket, ruddy-cheeked but determined. He’d been drunk enough to fall into that old rhythm he’d once mastered. It didn’t matter what he wanted. It was easy and Portia seemed to understand her charge. Perhaps she wasn’t as much a trembling rose as he had at first believed. 

And she was beautiful. Soft, smooth, sweet smelling. But when he looked at her sprawled beneath him she wasn’t the king’s daughter at all. She was a girl with golden hair and sharp green eyes that saw the truth in everything, and he wasn’t himself but someone with a body leaner and alabaster and not yet ruined by scars.

He knew in some deep part of himself that it was wrong, but instead of shame he felt betrayal. 

* * *

“Duchess, a rider.”

Ingrid stood from her work fiddling with a woeful rosebush to turn and face the voice calling out to her from the greenhouse’s arched door. She slipped her thumb between her lips as she did, sucking at the drop of blood pricked by a thorn. It was perhaps a fool’s errand to force herself into gardening the way she had. She’d never been good at it before. Now the greenhouse was full of a fleet of withered and over-pruned rosebushes, but she was pleased that at least a few of them had survived her ministrations.

Gardening, riding, housekeeping — not sweeping and cooking but managing the sprawling estate, no small task — visiting with the local lords and ladies and listening to their indiscretions: she was not nearly as good at any of it as she was at cutting men down. It was an unnerving revelation to have discovered now that they were no longer at war, one that she did not dare to linger on for too long.

“Thank you, Matthieu,” she told her page, a strapping young lad from a new family who had been millers before they’d been named marquises. He nodded and pressed himself against the door so that she could fit through into the chill outside. Ingrid pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders as she did, her heels crunching against the season’s first carpeting of frost as she hunted out the stairs leading back into the Fraldarius castle.

The castle was large, cool, clean. It wasn’t filled with tapestries and oddities in the usual style. She wondered if perhaps it had been before. Rodrigue hadn’t had his son’s reserve, after all. It wasn’t that she had a preference in either direction. Felix’s austerity was anything but surprising, and she’d never been one for frills and decadence herself. Still, it felt a little lonely, all grey and without much softness to rest one’s eyes upon.

Lonely too because Dimitri had been hoarding Felix for seasons. Husband or not, he was still her friend. There had been times when they’d sat together reading in the library or walked along the balustrades arm-in-arm, not out of undue affection but simply because it had always been that way before. No doubt they’d never have anything closer than that, of course, but she’d always liked that he’d been comfortable with her. It had been nice.

But Felix was clever in an even-keeled sort of way that neatly countered Dimitri’s overconfident optimism (and, in spells, his dark moods as well). She understood why the king summoned him so frequently. No doubt he wanted desperately to rekindle their old friendship as well. Felix had always been his favorite — enough even for him to temper all of his adolescent bitterness.

Not that it was unusual. Felix was _everyone’s_ favorite. There was no logic to it. It wasn’t as if he chased after their affection, at least not any longer. Maybe that was the secret to it — all of them were competitive, after all. It made her smile to think of it that way. Yes, maybe nothing had really changed. How different were they, in the end, from the children they had once been: skinned-kneed and tumbling against each other as they all fought over the distinction of first place?

Her smile faltered as she peeked through a window to see just who it was who had ridden to her door. It wasn’t a surprise. That didn’t make her any more eager to greet him.

“Hello, Sylvain,” she welcomed him, watching with a cocked brow as he left his horse to a stablehand and pocketed his gloves.

“Ingrid,” he replied, sugar-sweet. “You’re looking as lovely as ever.” She crossed her arms over her shabby coat and fought the urge to pat her hair neat.

“Felix isn’t here,” she continued quickly. He maintained his easy smile as if she didn’t spot that little wince at the corners of his eyes. She would have pitied him in any other circumstance. As it was, however, she was just already enormously exhausted with the entire fiasco.

“That isn’t the nicest way to greet a friend.”

Maybe she deserved that.

“I told you he wasn’t here,” she insisted as she waved him into the castle. He followed after, his footsteps echoing in the rafters. “When I wrote you last week. I know you read my letters.”

“Yes, well, but you told me he was in Fhirdiad and he wasn’t _there_, either.”

“I’m not Felix’s keeper.”

“You are as much as any of us,” he contended. There was something pitiful in the way he said it. That made her chest pinch if just in the subtlest of ways. She sighed.

“Come on, then. I’ll have them fetch us some tea.”

They settled in a sunny salon filled with the crackle of a fire. A serving girl brought Ingrid’s promised kettle but Sylvain had the look of someone who needed something a little stronger. She didn’t humor him, although the notion had otherwise softened some of her reserve.

“It’s not like I haven’t written to him, you know,” Sylvain muttered, his elbows propped against the arms of his chair and his fingers caged over his mouth as he stared into the nearby fireplace. Her eyes drifted along his knuckles as he talked. He wasn’t wearing his wedding band. None of them did. Easy enough to explain it away — not safe to wear a ring when you were swinging a sword, after all. No matter that they didn’t do that sort of thing anymore.

“I know,” she answered quietly. His eyes darted to hers before sinking to the coals again.

“I mean... this is ridiculous, even for Felix. I ride to the capital and am told he’s here — by Linhardt, of all people, that fucking weasel—”

“_Sylvain_.”

“And then I come here and you tell me that he’s in Fhirdiad.”

“I didn’t say that,” she corrected him. He glanced over in her direction again. “He’s gone to Almyra.”

“_Almyra_?” Sylvain’s hands dropped from his mouth to rub at his eyes. “What is — why?”

“Because Dimitri is in Almyra,” she answered simply. “Meeting with Claude, as I understand it. That _is_ his charge, you know.”

“When did he leave?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“A few _weeks_? Ingrid, why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“Because then you would have just ridden there instead. Almyra isn’t some tiny place, you know. You probably would have been eaten by a wyvern before he had the chance to tell you to leave.” He flinched. Probably not the best opportunity for a joke, she realized too late. That made her sigh again.

“For fuck’s sake.” Sylvain dragged his fingers through his hair. It was looking a little shaggy. She wondered idly if that new wife of his hadn’t pestered him to cut it. “I’m tired of this bloody game. I can’t write to him and I can’t speak to him, so what in the hell am I supposed to do?”

She didn’t have an answer for him. Part of her was even satisfied to see him squirming in this predicament he’d created. That said, it wasn’t entirely fair. Perhaps the fact that she knew that was why she kept counseling him as he ran endlessly headfirst into the wall that Felix had built between them.

“I think you might just need to give him some time.”

“What, ten fucking years? He does this. You know it as well as I do. Runs away from things and makes them worse. If he would just _listen_ to me—”

“It’s not that simple, Sylvain.” His face folded into a scowl.

“Do you think I don’t know that? Why do you think I’m here?”

“I don’t know!” She’d tried to bite her tongue, but she’d never been very good at that with him. “It’s not like I can convince him of anything, and even if I could, why would I? You were — it was a cruel thing that you did.”

“_Cruel_?” He spat the word, his scowl growing more bitter. “I know it’s easy for all of you to look at me like I’m some kind of monster, but you’ve damn well done the same things I have, so what right do you have to judge me?”

“That’s quite the interpretation you have of our situation,” she drawled in reply. He stood from his seat, his tall body bristling as he began to pace away his temper.

“It isn’t,” he insisted, accentuating each word with the wave of his hand. “You, and I, and Felix, and Portia, we’re all playing the same bloody game.”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly _how_?”

“I know that you haven’t forgotten how close Gautier is, having just ridden the road yourself. Surely you don’t think that I haven’t heard about the margravine’s..._condition_. Congratulations, by the way,” she amended, perhaps a bit too sourly. Sylvain flushed at the mention of his unborn child.

“That... That isn’t important.” She huffed out an incredulous breath of laughter.

“I think Felix might feel differently.”

“I didn’t have a choice! It’s not like it’s been — listen,” he stammered, brows furrowed, “It’s not as if I love her.”

“Is that supposed to win me over? That poor girl is a victim: a coin paid between two selfish men. Don’t you dare try to tell me that somehow this is _her_ fault.”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything, I’m just trying to explain what the hell is going on!”

“I don’t care about what’s going on!” She stood from her seat as well, fists balled into tight fists. “I already know! You’ve always done this. Ever since we were children, and without giving a damn about what it does to anyone but you. I don’t care if you’re upset, Sylvain! There were a dozen different ways that you could have handled this and you chose the path that was easiest for you, and so now you will have to reap what you’ve sown.”

“Easy?” His voice had risen to meet her own, and both of them too loud for a supposed chat over tea. She knew she should have hushed him — after all, the whole idea was for some part of this to be a secret, wasn’t it? — but her own heart was beating too fast to manage such a thing.

“Tell me exactly what part of this is easy,” he continued icily. “Felix and I have done the exact same bloody thing, and now I’m being punished for it. That isn’t easy!”

“Are you not listening to me? It’s not the same!”

“It is,” he insisted brusquely. “I slept with her _once_. Everything that’s happened, it was a fucking _miracle_. I know I should have told him, but running from me certainly isn’t the fucking way to give me the opportunity now!”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you slept with her!”

“It does! You fucked him, too!” Her rising anger deflated into something cold and cringing.

“What the hell are you talking about,” she stuttered. “I didn’t.” His eyes steadied on her, stony and unblinking. “He... he told you about that?”

“Yes,” he snapped in reply. She sunk back into her chair.

“That was almost ten years ago, Sylvain.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that he married you.” A part of her wondered if he was right. It was quickly overwhelmed by a bitter and protective gnawing at the pit of her stomach.

“I slept with him,” she agreed tightly. “It was a horrible mistake. I was lonely and... I loved Glenn. I know that I was just a girl, but that didn’t change how I felt. It was real. I thought that maybe if there was still a part of him here and living, that it would...” She shook her head. “But it wasn’t. Felix wasn’t the boy I’d loved, and he was already in love with you, and where were you? Chasing after girls without even knowing their names. And you _knew_. I know you did. But you only wanted him once you realized that you weren’t the only one who could have him. You and I are not the same. It’s not the _same_.”

He pivoted on his heel to stalk towards the windows. His posture was tight and tensed. She recognized it from when she’d fought beside him.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted to her finally, his voice swallowed back into a murmur again. She sighed and tipped her head against the cushion of her chair.

“You need to leave it be for a while,” she told him. “I’ll tell him that you’ve come here. He knows that you’re trying to speak with him. Just give him the time he needs to... consider everything, first.”

“And for how long, then?”

How long? She wasn’t certain. To be honest, Sylvain knew him better than she did. And how could anyone quantify everything that had happened and distill it into a neat timeline? But still, she’d seen Felix flounder under Sylvain’s inattention before. He’d never been so..._crestfallen_ as he’d been when he’d told her about Sylvain’s betrothal. It had been understated, as everything was with him, but that hadn’t made it any less painful to observe.

Even then she somehow knew that Felix would still be cursed to chase after him. They were nothing but two massive stars trapped in each other’s orbit and fated to spiral closer together until they finally collided in a spectacular bang. And maybe she wanted to protect him from it, if only for a few weeks, a few days before he tossed himself into Sylvain’s hungry mouth again. It was the least that she could do.

“For as long as he needs.”

Sylvain accepted his sentence with a silent nod. It didn’t leave her satisfied, perhaps, but she was relieved that he had at last submitted instead of fighting on.

* * *

“Margrave. Margrave... sir. Milord.” 

His neck was sore. Shoulders, too — stiff and aching. He woke slowly and groaned as he sat upwards, fingers already massaging the complaining muscles at his nape. Sore because he’d slept against his desk, he realized: _shit_. Marjorie, the girl he’d stolen from the stables to turn into his page, looked an interesting mix of nervous and a little annoyed. She must have been at the whole business of waking him for a while.

Not a good look, maybe, but better than sleeping in his room. After all, he could hardly toss Portia from his bed and she was so good-natured that he was starting to find it difficult to lie to her about why he was so very stodgy when he slept beside her.

“Yes?” He rubbed his fingers over his face, his hoarse voice echoing into his palms. “What is it?”

“A letter for you, milord.” He stared blearily at the thing she was brandishing at him. “A rider’s brought it, said it was urgent.” He felt his brow crumple slightly as he recognized the shape of its seal.

“Alright,” he answered, snatching it from her. “Thank you, Marjorie. They’ve just brought it now, then?”

“Yes, milord.” She’d started to turn that pink color of hers that came about when they held any length of conversation. She was perhaps not the best page to be found in all of Gautier. No matter.

“Good. Thank you.” He waved the letter at her. “Go on, then.” She bowed lowly and scrambled back into the hall. He let his face fall into a more earnestly anxious shape once she’d disappeared.

The Fraldarius seal, deep navy in color, pulled neatly from the envelope as he eased it open. It had only been two weeks since he’d last seen Ingrid. Was it possible that his punishment had already come to an end? Bless her if it had — maybe she was still his friend after all. His heart hammered hopefully as he fished the letter from its envelope and flattened it against his desk. Its pulse quickened and then plummeted into some frozen depth deep in his gut.

_Sylvain_, it read in a rushed hand that filled half of the page:

_Come quickly. Felix is ill._

_Ingrid _


	11. Dearly Beloved

The Sreng were a people who wandered. It was in their blood — something that, when spilled, had that same mineral bitterness to it as their barren soil. Their children were placed on horseback before they could properly walk, and they learned to read the fidgeting of their flock before they could puzzle out the shapes of words upon a page. It was not wanderlust but desperation that kept their feet dancing forward in their endless circling of their frozen peninsula. Still, there was something soothing in it — sleeping under the stars and traveling with the sun as it soared across the sky. 

Portia had been born in a cage from which she’d never strayed far. Her father did not teach her to ride. He taught her to dance and sing instead, and brought her strange instruments from the south to learn to play. Her mother tongue was a mystery forbidden to her, replaced instead by Fodlan’s harsh staccato. She was given sweet girls to care after her and cherished rare afternoons with her sisters (impressive, sometimes intimidating creatures who lived full lives so unlike her own), but her comfort did not fool her. She knew she was being hoarded away, and she knew it was because she was pleasing — a ewe coveted to be shorn.

When they’d come to drape her in her wedding veils she hadn’t allowed herself the folly of thinking than her marriage was an escape. She did not hate her father, but she also didn’t suspect that he was unique in any regard. If another man had agreed to marry her, it had been at a cost that was surely not her freedom. Moreover, the implications of the agreement her father had entered into on her behalf were obvious even to a girl so sheltered as herself.

She had not been thrilled, of course, to learn that her hand had been promised to something called a margrave, but neither was she frightened. She supposed she could endure a man as well as she had endured everything else. She would miss her serving girls, who wept as she was taken away, but at least her sisters promised to visit her in her new gilded cell. _Nothing will happen to you, kitten_, they had promised her as they marched her southwards; _or we’ll skin this man of yours alive_.

She didn’t doubt they could. They — Yevgenia, Natalia, and Xenia — could do most everything. But as doting as they’d always been over her as their littlest sister, she hadn’t overlooked the simple fact that they had never stolen her away, either. She was as much a bartering chip to them as she was to her father: a promise that they could continue on in their own fancies instead of worrying over the beggar’s seat of her father’s dominion.

So she hadn’t dreamed about her wedding day. Hadn’t bashfully planned how she would navigate the night that came after. No one had asked just how she wished to be dressed as she was brought forward to her betrothed, but she was confident that whatever had been selected for her would be sufficient. She leaned into the familiar training from the cotillion of her youth and let it sweep her across the choreograph of her nuptials without resistance.

The first complication of this approach had been her groom himself. He was much younger than she had anticipated. Her father had told her that he was an important man, so she had expected him to have paid for that power with years — for him to be wiry and grey and bitter from age. Instead he was tall and youthful, although he had a sad look of distance in his eyes that suggested he’d seen or done or been subjected to something terrible during his early-seasoned life. He was polite when she first met him: offered her the same trite welcome that she’d prepared for him as well.

Perhaps he was a simpleton, she wondered next. Trained to the charade of being a lord and all of the courtesies that such a position demanded, but without much passion waiting below his formalities. It seemed quite possible. She had studied the complicated logic of lordships and nobility as part of her girlhood lessons (no matter that it seemed that most of it had been recently shuffled by some new king), and had found them so complex that she supposed they would demand most of one’s focus to navigate them.

_That was it_, she decided as she danced with lords young and old and declaring a dozen different strange titles to her as they introduced themselves during their reception: and so here was her charge, to be a pretty bird on his shoulder as this Margrave Gautier climbed up Fodlan’s ladder.

But then he’d lingered in his seat while she submitted herself to her task of socializing, and instead of toasting his guests’ tasteless congratulations about her looks he’d drunken himself into a lonely and bleary-eyed stupor. She heard whispers amidst the cheer of the crowd about how improper his behavior was, but the dry tone of their gossip made it seem as though they weren’t surprised.

When her sisters then chased the both of them into the privacy of his quarters (their faces set into that grim shape that told her do your duty), her heart had hammered from the idea that his red-cheeked drunkenness was dangerous. He was strong, after all. She could see that in the set of his broad shoulders shaped the same as the brutish sentinels that guarded Kalang. Would he hurt her? Would her sisters stop him if she cried out to them, or was such a thing just part of her father’s deal?

“Um,” he’d muttered once Yevgenia had closed them into the dim-lit room. “Sorry.”

Sorry for what? For the room, a little messy, cluttered with books and letters drawn over in a crooked hand; for the way he was wavering in his spot like a top at the last moments of its pirouette; for how the people of this place named after him had gasped and gawped at her like some broodmare brought to market; for the slur of his voice, low in its baritone?

The word was too loaded, too complex. She stepped forward and worried over the buttons of his jacket instead. Do your duty, she’d told herself again, feeling the tips of her ears grow hot as he watched her with an almost childlike curiosity. Then he had kissed her. It was neither crude nor chaste. Drunk as he was, he tipped his head to the perfect angle to continue with the task. His mouth was cool, as if he’d been sucking on an ice chip, but it was still inviting.

So. He wasn’t a fool like those men simpering in the hall below them in their sea of velvet jackets. Her brief memory of the guards at Kalang had been a fitting one. His body was scarred like theirs, palms calloused, muscles purpose-built. She’d been so certain that her father had taken advantage of him in their dealings, but now she wondered if he’d feared him as well. And perhaps it was not just him but some of the others she’d seen among the revelers with that same fogged stare — like that slender, freckled man who had seemed a little shy, or that blonde shield maiden who had reminded her so much of her battle-hungry sisters despite her handsome features.

She didn’t understand it. Wasn’t certain why, in the morning that came after, she woke both to an empty bed and to a nervous girl standing beside it asking her just how she preferred to break her fast. Her sisters congratulated her afterwards on her fine showing and made no further mention of her new husband. So he hadn’t gone to them, then, had he, to field some complaint about her behavior? But then why was it that he was so difficult to find? And was it to be expected that a man so newly married would so rarely sleep in his own bed?

_A mistress_, she decided next, although she wasn’t certain if the name was so appropriate if she had only just entered into the scene herself. He must have had one. But then why was it that all of those lords flittering through the halls kept watching her so hungrily, as if she were the only thing to eat for miles?

At first she’d feared that perhaps her husband was enamored with that young girl who had grown accustomed to trailing at her heels. It wasn’t as if Portia was so mature herself, but this Marjorie was nearly a child. The idea had made her sick until she’d watched the girl turn petrified in the margrave’s presence and had noticed the tight, half-amused and half-annoyed way that he’d looked back at her in turn.

Not Marjorie, then. But it hadn’t been as though he’d seemed to be a man chased out of celibacy on their wedding night, so what was it? It wasn’t her, or at least not her looks — not that she wished to brag about the fact, but it was objectively the reason why she had been a prisoner since she’d been born, so there was no point in being humble. Did he think that she was a fool?

To hell with that.

She’d robbed his libraries next, picking out the books that seemed the most worn and feeling particularly victorious when she noticed his messy handwriting scrawled in the margins. Their polite dinners together had become a testing ground for what she’d learned — history, agriculture, religion, even — and he always seemed relatively engaged: offered her interesting counterpoints, acknowledged when she was right without seeming condescending.

Her fears that he was simple had been fully quashed by then. He was quick to get to the heart of things, seemed well-read, and was well-spoken if a little informal compared to his peers. It did seem as though he grew bored quickly with nearly everything, but he was never rude.

Honestly, it was infuriating.

By the time she’d realized that there was a cause for her strange shifting appetites and morning-time nausea she’d nearly exhausted all of her tests to understand just why he was so chivalrously indifferent with her. But there it was, like an answer to a prayer she hadn’t fully intended to form: and it was what he wanted, wasn’t it? An heir, and one owed not just its father’s seat but hers as well?

He’d looked sick when she’d told him. In that moment she’d nearly lost her fortressed temper — and so what the hell was wrong with her, then? Just how could he explain himself? What did he want from her?

After all, if he had been any other man she would have been relieved that he seemed completely unmoved by the prospect of touching her. But he wasn’t some sneering old lecher like she had imagined. She’d discovered in her months spent in the holdfast that he’d built an inner circle for himself constructed entirely of laymen like little Marjorie, a butcher’s daughter, instead of the sniveling lords who were always chasing at his heels. He was kind to them and they were besotted with him in return, undermining the nobility’s grumbling about his methods with their endless appreciation for his management of their quaint peasants’ plots and the lives they lived inside them.

And he had been kind to her as well: hadn’t ordered her to conduct herself in any particular way, had encouraged her when she’d asked for the foods and comforts she liked. And for the first time in her life she hadn’t lived behind locked doors. She was convinced, in fact, that she could have marched back north while announcing her intentions, and that he would have likely given her the choice of horses from his stables to carry her there when she did.

It was just that three-quarters of him seemed to be living in a different world.

So when she came upon him one morning to find him with his face unusually filled with emotion — and an unsettled one, his face pale and his brows drawn tight together above his mouth stretched into a grim line — she had been startled. Her first thought had been that they were in some sort of danger. She’d crossed her arms protectively over the growing swell of her belly and had cornered him to insist that he at least tell her what was going on.

_The Duke has fallen ill_, he’d told her, like some party-favor riddle. He’d read her confusion with an annoyed glance. It was another emotion he’d never turned on her before. He was anxious, she realized: angry that she had stopped his quick step down the hall.

_An old friend_, he’d clarified. _I must go tend to him. It may be some time_.

She’d trailed after him as he continued towards the southern gates and the stables waiting for him there. Her mind had quickly pieced together the situation as she knew it with each dancing step. _A friend_. She’d never really had such a thing, but she could understand the notion. It didn’t seem as though he had many of them here — certainly there were many who were fond of him, but they were his subjects, not his equals. She wasn’t quite certain just how he saw her, but _friend_ didn’t seem to be the proper word for it, either.

And she’d learned from the sweet old baker who snuck her the spiced treats she sometimes craved that the margrave had once had a brother, and that this brother had died. His father and his mother, too. That he’d been close to the man they now called their king, and that he rarely saw him now; and that there were others as well who had found themselves in the same situation with the closing of the war.

_Lonely_, she’d finally realized, the word ringing in her head like a bell. It wasn’t simplemindedness or infidelity filling that moat between them, it was his loneliness.

_Let me come with you_, she’d begged him. He’d turned on his heel at the suggestion, his incredulous look naked on his face.

_That isn’t necessary_, he’d quickly insisted. She’d squeezed her fingers into fists at her side and leveled her gaze on him.

_You shouldn’t go alone_.

She hadn’t said it like a question. He’d flinched, still looking frustrated but perhaps a bit subdued. Her heart had thrummed in her chest at his look. _Good_. It had taken nineteen years, but Portia had finally found the keys to her cage.

* * *

“You’re here.” Ingrid greeted him in the castle’s yard, already shivering and unshielded from the snow. His stomach flipped as he leapt from his saddle. She sounded relieved. Was that a good thing? Would she have been weeping instead if he were somehow too late? 

“I’m here,” he agreed tightly. “Is he?”

“Yes.” Her eyes darted over his shoulder to the dark blip of the carriage that had trailed him. One of her brows crooked. Most of him wanted to rush past her, but there was a part of him that also wished to simply sink into the earth and disappear.

“You always do things in the worst ways,” she sighed. He rubbed at a spot between his eyes.

“I didn’t have a choice.” How could he have rebuked Portia’s request to accompany him? It had been, objectively, a striking and heartwarming offer: that, despite his tepid treatment of her, she had demanded to come along in his support to a stranger’s home. He’d tried to shake her off by telling her that he meant to ride in that same day, and that the snow would make it so that it was imperative that he arrive before the sun set. There would be no time for her to prepare her things.

_No matter_, she had replied easily: _I’ll simply send for them afterwards_.

And perhaps it had been rude of him to ride off afterwards as she settled herself into her carriage alone, but he was seemingly in the business of making cruel decisions, so what did it matter now?

“I’m sorry, Ingrid,” he amended quietly. She shook her head.

“Go on, then. You’ll know where to find him.” His legs tensed to dash forward into the Fraldarius’ grey lair, but he lingered for a step.

“What happened?” Better that he be prepared. How could he manage the worst without a warning? His mind spun with a dozen different horrid predictions: burns and gashes and missing limbs. Ingrid shook her head again.

“Their envoy was set upon by an ambush on their return from Almyra. His Highness, Dedue — none of them were seriously injured. Felix hardly mentioned it, but he looked... I don’t know, tired. Worn down. He started sleeping later and later into the morning and was dragging by dinner again. One morning he didn’t wake at all.”

“Didn’t...” Sylvain echoed, his heart thrashing.

“He’s alive,” she corrected him quickly, cheeks darkening as she realized her mistake. “But he hasn’t been conscious for three days. Our mages have looked at him and say that he’s perfectly healthy. It’s... I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” Her voice had taken on a shaken tone, like a little girl describing the monster lurking in her closet. “I’ve sent a messenger to the capital. If the same happens to Dimitri...”

Sylvain gripped her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. There was no need for her to finish her prediction: he knew as well as her the cost of a premature end to poor Dimitri’s reign.

“We’ll figure it out, Ingrid,” he reassured her. She nodded slowly. He squeezed again before releasing her to trail into the castle.

It was gloomy inside, and not just because it always was, what with Felix’s stubborn approach to interior design. Lords and servants alike were lurking in the shadows of the hall, sharing whispered words as they watched him walk briskly in the direction of the duke’s quarters. _Don’t damn him already_, Sylvain thought bitterly as he did his best to ignore their eyes.

_But what if they’re right?_

He leapt nimbly up a set of stairs, his damp boots squealing against the pavers. _What if they’re right? _He shivered as he crossed a corridor and then another, his body feeling as if it were packed tight with that dense snow still tumbling outside.

_ What if he dies and leaves you all alone? You miserable fucking bastard._

He made the final turn in the familiar path leading to Felix’s room. It wasn’t the grand airy space where Rodrigue had once slept — that had been relegated to Ingrid alone. The quarters of a second son seemed hardly appropriate for a duke, but maybe Felix’s retainers knew better than to try to convince him otherwise.

Or maybe they simply didn’t care. He’d inherited the impossible: unlike Gautier, the lords of Fraldarius had always loved their sovereign. Rodrigue had been a hero to them, as his father had been before him. Felix had, Sylvain suspected, even outshone his sire after everything he’d done in the war. No matter to them that he didn’t sleep with his wife, herself a legend to them as well: not some bride bought for convenience but another scarred veteran who had bled and killed for them.

All of that was well and good, but it didn’t stop the air from spilling from his lungs as he finally crossed into that old and familiar room. How many days and nights had he spent there as a child? It had been his favorite place to hide: from Miklan, from his father, from all of the threats and curses that filled the holdfast that was his home.

There was the little writing desk that he and Felix had once draped with sheets and turned into a bandit’s lair back when Sylvain had been just old enough to not lose himself in his imagination the way the younger boy still could. Even then he had been charmed by him — his long lashes, thick and dark like a girl’s; his eyes, nearly the same color as his own but somehow far more striking; his hot, squirming body already nimble and forecasting the lithe killer he’d eventually become.

No matter his age, he’d always played along with Felix’s strange stories. Glenn and Ingrid had often teased him for them, but to Sylvain they had been an escape from a grim childhood filled with bruises and rough hands. And maybe Felix had known; maybe that was why he was always spinning them for him, his face full of boyish smiles as he added one ridiculous punchline to the next until Sylvain’s shoulders were bouncing with laughter.

His father, his mother, already a ghost; his brother and his nursemaids and the noble stable of his childhood friends: out of all of them, Felix had been the only one he’d ever loved.

_But you only wanted him once you realized that you weren’t the only one who could have him_, Ingrid had told him. It had been the truth, but not in the way she’d meant it. The fact was that from the very start he’d been determined not to drag him down into that dark pit he lived in, so well-hidden behind his sugared smiles and carefully tempered moods, but that he’d also been so wickedly hungry for his fickle affection that he couldn’t stop himself from grabbing at him time and time again.

_Fuck_.

His eyes finally glided from the tapestries on the wall to settle on Felix’s bed. He limped towards it, feet dragging against the threadbare carpet sprawled over the castle’s cold stone. It would have been better, maybe, if Felix had looked truly ill: green-faced or pale-lipped, or feverish and wild.

Instead it looked as though he’d just drifted to sleep moments before. He recognized the relaxed set of his features from when he’d drowsed beside him, warm and bare-skinned. Someone — Ingrid, no doubt — had braided his hair into a wide plait that snaked over his left shoulder. It was dark against his sheets. He watched it as it slowly rose and fell in time with his steady breathing.

_Felix_.

There was a chair at his bedside. Sylvain staggered into it, his elbows planting against his knees as he shielded his face in his hands. The room was quiet save for the even rhythm of Felix’s breathing, and the crackle of the nearby fireplace, and the tinkling of snow against theancient windowpanes. Each sound was insufferable — like the ticking of a clock built beside a gallows.

He felt as if he were falling and grabbing at a hundred handholds that kept slipping through his fingers, and each one of them a mistake he’d made to throw him into the damned place he found himself in now. A useless stream of words began to fill his mind, but none of them offered him what he needed: an apology, or an excuse, or a way to resurrect the man before him, and not just to wake him, but to piece him back into the lover he’d been before.

_What am I supposed to do?_

And maybe if he’d been a hero from one of their childhood books he could have pressed his lips against his and stirred him from his slumber. Or, if that had failed, he could have bowed his head in prayer to that mysterious goddess watching over them to beg for her tender intervention.

But he was just a man, and so was Felix; and that silver-stoned castle was just a dot against the vast atlas of their world, itself so easily redrawn. And no matter how monumental this moment was for him, there were others who were simply carrying on without the simplest notion of how it had felt to hear Felix admit that he’d loved him, and who had never suffered that sharp pang in their chest when they spotted his dark hair unexpectedly in a crowd.

So Felix kept on sleeping and Sylvain kept on falling, and the world kept spinning on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a slow chapter (I know, Sylvain being miserable is quite the revelation) but an important pause before we get into the final set of updates! 
> 
> Thank you again to everyone for reading, and especially for the comments — it has been so fascinating to watch different readers empathize more with Felix or Sylvain as the story has unfolded, and oftentimes opposite to how I was feeling when I was writing up any particular scene. It is also fantastic that in the ongoing debate of who is the more sympathetic character, the answer always seems to be Linhardt :) 
> 
> Thank you all for sticking along with this sad little story, and looking forward to publishing the last few chapters soon!!


	12. Revenir

Sylvain woke hunched in his chair, his arms crossed tight over his chest and his shoulders aching from his crumpled pose. The room was dark but warm. Someone must have stoked the fire while he slept. The realization left him feeling a little embarrassed. Still, he had become accustomed to sleeping in strange places, so it wasn’t so much a surprise that he had dozed as deeply as he had.

He rubbed at his bleary eyes and focused his gaze on Felix, who was still transfixed in his peaceful repose, his milk-glass face cast in dramatic shadow by the fire flickering cheerfully in the hearth. Only once he’d taken stock of the man’s condition did he notice the quiet sniffling coming from a far corner.

He stared with surprise at the little boy cowering in the shadows. The boy stared back at him, scrubbing at his teary cheeks with the butt of his palm. For a moment Sylvain felt as if he were trapped in some warped looking glass — that the ghost of the boy he’d once been had scraped itself from all of the memories lurking in that room to haunt him once more — until he noticed that the child’s shaggy hair was brown, not red, and that he had a little scar running across the bridge of his nose that did not belong to Sylvain’s own litany of marks and welts.

“Hello,” the boy whispered hoarsely, his eyes darting to his toes.

“Hello,” Sylvain replied. He felt his voice rumble in his throat, proof that he was in fact awake and that this was not some strange dream. “Who are — what’s your name?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders, his gaze still fast between his socked feet. He was too neatly dressed to belong to the retinue of stablehands and rat-catchers that called the castle home. Some visiting lordling escaped from his bed, Sylvain supposed: and rough luck for him that his father had chosen to visit the duchy during such a dire time.

“Is he going to die?” The boy’s simple question sunk like a chunk of ice into his gut. He forced his lips into a reassuring smile.

“Of course not,” he promised. The boy looked up at him shyly before glancing down again. He was supposed to say more: children needed that sort of thing. But what else could he possibly tell him without sounding like a liar?

“Castor,” Ingrid’s voice interrupted along with the creak of the door as she slipped inside from the chilly hallway. She was gripping a candlestick that had transformed her hair into a golden halo around her head. The boy — Castor, Sylvain supposed — avoided her tipped gaze as she swept towards him. “There you are. Have you already forgotten our promise about leaving your room at night?”

“No,” Castor answered in a hushed whisper. Ingrid crouched at his side and leaned forward to brush the tousled hair from his brow.

“You know,” Ingrid continued in a conspiratorial tone, “my friend there was once a knight.” Castor followed her eyes as she looked up in Sylvain’s direction.

“Really?” The boy wiped at his nose as he stared at him in wonder. _In a manner of speaking_, Sylvain thought dryly. There hadn’t been much time for knighting, and no king to do it when he’d been so busy killing and keeping himself alive.

“Yes,” he lied.

“And it was very important that he always got a full night’s rest. Isn’t that right?” Sylvain nodded.

“Very important.”

“You wouldn’t want the Duke to think you aren’t taking your training seriously, would you?”

“No,” Castor mumbled, wrenching the hem of his shirt between his fingers. Ingrid nodded sagely.

“Of course not,” she agreed. “Go on with Mildred, then.” She nodded at the governess waiting for him in the hall. Castor’s eyes danced back towards the bed. Sylvain heard the gentle rush of Ingrid’s sigh as she rubbed his tiny shoulders.

“He’s just sleeping,” she reassured him. “There’s nothing to be frightened about. Go on.” She nudged him gently towards the door. He finally relented, his feet scuffing against the floorboards as he skulked to his governess’ side. Sylvain watched him toddle away before turning to Ingrid with a cocked brow.

“Castor,” she explained with a tired smile, shaking her head as she did. “You remember the Lemieuxs? Earl Callum — he had three sons and a daughter. I think she was your age.” Memories of the family — all brown-haired and blue-eyed like their father, a minor player in the capital politic game who had sometimes dined with his father when they visited with the king — gathered hazily in his mind. She caught his look of recognition even in the gloom.

“They were all killed in the war— the Earl, his wife, their staff, even, down to the washerwomen.” She looked to the empty doorway where the little boy had disappeared. “He was the only one to survive. He doesn’t like to speak about it, of course, but from what I’ve gathered he lived with a band of other boys like him for some time. They knew that his blood was more blue than theirs and treated him poorly. Not that you can blame them.” _No_. The war made cruel creatures from little boys.

“One of our men recognized him on the streets during the coronation celebrations. He brought him here. I tried to track down some family for him, but it doesn’t...” She shook her head. “In any case, we have plenty of room for him. I don’t think he likes me very much.” She arched her brows ruefully. “But he loves Felix. He’s always at his heels like a shadow, you know? He has decided that he’d like to become a knight and so Felix has told him that he can be his squire.”

Sylvain wagged his head at the idea. She made a commiserating sound.

“That boy can’t be more than seven years old,” he contended.

“Six,” she corrected. “But he’s taken on his role very seriously. I can’t imagine Felix’s study has ever been so tidy before.” Ingrid sat her candle neatly on the floor before leaning her back against the wall. She hugged her knees to her chest, resting her chin against them as she stared at Felix’s slumbering form.

“No matter what we do,” she continued more quietly, “it’s always the same old terrible story, isn’t it?” He sucked in a deep breath and studied her. “I don’t know who killed his family. There aren’t any records of their allegiance at the time. For all I know their killer was a man who I armed and fed and fought with arm-in-arm.”

“It was war, Ingrid.” She nodded her chin against the mounds of her knees.

“It was.” They were both quiet for a time.

“Is he going to die?” Castor’s question sounded wrong in Sylvain’s voice. Startled, Ingrid turned to look at him. Her eyes were like two glimmering emeralds in the candlelight. He returned her stare only briefly before looking to Felix again.

“I don’t know,” she admitted in a near-whisper. He winced under the press of some invisible boulder against his chest. “What will you do if he does?”

“How many years have we sat together in this room?” Sylvain answered her question with one of his own. She frowned, confused, but he continued on without a pause. “Do you remember when Dimitri broke that little ship that Felix kept in a bottle on his desk? You would have been... seven, maybe eight years old. Glenn had helped him build it — well, had built it himself, but had let Felix believe he’d helped. Felix was so heartbroken he decided to run away. It was winter and snowing. Thick, like a blanket, and so much of it you couldn’t see the walls from the yard. Duke Rodrigue was so worried. Even for Felix it was a dangerous thing to run off into a snowstorm like that.” He smiled wistfully.

“Dimitri was crying. _You_ were crying. Glenn was trying to look, I don’t know, _commanding_, but he was as desperate as the rest of us. They wanted to send the dogs after him but that would have just scared him, you know? So I ran off after him instead. Stole my father’s horse, even — ran her too hard, he was so _furious_ afterwards. When we came back I thought maybe my father’d wished we’d stayed lost instead.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But that didn’t matter.No matter where Felix went, I would always follow. Running and chasing.” Sylvain huffed a breath through his nose and nodded his head at the memory. “Always. Wherever he goes, Ingrid, I’ll follow.”

* * *

The morning after Ingrid shooed Sylvain from Felix’s room, insisting that he at least eat something and change his clothes before resuming his vigil again. He knew better than to refuse her, seeing that her mind was settled on the idea. There was a shirt and trousers folded neatly and waiting for him on the bed he and Portia had been given, paired with a grey woolen cloak draped across a nearby chair to ward off the castle’s chill. He wasn’t certain to whom they had originally belonged: they were too long in the limb for Felix, naturally, but made from a finer weave than the utilitarian cotton worn by the staff. 

That was the magic of a duchy, he supposed. Fraldarius had always been a rich territory, blessed both with dark soil and ports much unlike the stony pastures and frozen forests of Gautier. He supposed tailors would benefit from such a thing as much as dukes and lords.

Portia had been given a host of dresses as well. He inspected them after he’d slipped on his own loaned attire, his fingers skimming across the velvet and thick brocade hanging from the bar of the room’s neat wardrobe. Had they been made for Ingrid, he wondered, out of some naive hope that she’d abandon her slacks for skirts and someday have the reason to let out their tapered waists?

Maybe. Maybe not. The reality was that Ingrid had regardless found her place in the duchy’s convoluted hierarchy. It was no secret that the staff respected her. Perhaps the estate would have been thrown into a panic otherwise, wringing their hands at Felix’s bedside as they wondered what would happen to the storied territory now that its namesake was indisposed. Thanks to the duchess, however, it was no different than if Felix had simply disappeared to the capital again.

It seemed to him, however, that her finest achievement had been sheltering that poor blue-eyed boy. No doubt there was some aspect of reparation in it — that had been obvious enough in the haunted, guilty look that had shadowed her face as she’d spoken about his family the night before — but Ingrid had always been clever. There was plenty of precedent for wards becoming heirs, particularly in a time like this when so many first and second sons had died young and unmarried. Better even that this Castor was a lordling and born from a northern family himself.

The Shield of Faerghus and his shield-maiden wife and a son shielded from the war; beloved by their people and by their king and all of that bloody nonsense. He rubbed his thumb over the embroidered cuff of a wine-colored gown and felt his stomach rise in his throat.

_What was he doing there? What place did a man like him have in a fable like that?_

“Sylvain.” He turned to spot his own wife standing in the doorway. The blade of something sharp twisted in his gut as he looked at her. She was carrying a bundle in her arms. “I’ve brought you something to eat.” The hint of a grin gathered at the corners of her lips. “The Duchess has told me that I’m not to let you back into the halls unless you finish it.”

Conniving — that was another word for Ingrid, and even if it was well-intentioned.

“Alright,” he sighed, waving at a little table tucked against the wall. Portia approached it with a sweep of her skirts. She produced two oranges and a hunk of cheese, paired soon after by a dark loaf of bread and a length of dried salami that smelled like fennel and allspice. Sylvain snatched a pitcher of water and its matched glasses from a bedside table before joining her. Pleased, Portia smoothed the fabric pulled taut over the swell of her stomach — this borrowed dress was green, a pretty tone against the color of her hair — and sat.

“The Duchess tells me that you have been close friends for a long time,” she offered as she began to neatly peel away one of the orange’s waxy rinds. He nodded, tearing a hunk from the loaf as he did. It was studded with raisins and cherry halves. He focused on their spotted patterning instead of her earnest smile.

“We were all raised together,” he told her.

“How lovely.”

“You can call her Ingrid. She won’t mind.” Portia shook her head.

“It isn’t proper, is it?” He watched as she tore the rind into smaller pieces and began to arrange them into a pyramid shape. “I’ve read that in your country there is a king,” she tapped the top torn piece with the perfect half-moon of her nail, “and his queen and his progeny, and then a duke, and then a margrave, and then...” She faltered, her pointer finger hovering over the next circle of rind.

“An earl,” Sylvain offered. Her cheeks grew pink.

“An earl,” she repeated. She plucked the piece from the tabletop and turned it between her fingers. “In Sreng you are a king or you are a man,” she admitted with a smile. “I am my father’s daughter, but I’ve never been a princess. I must admit that I find it a little confusing.”

“It’s all nonsense.” His retort was more bitter than he’d intended. Still, the only reason his family had been given a title to begin with was because they’d been willing to throw themselves against Sreng’s swords. That didn’t seem to mean much at all if he’d married her, princess or otherwise.

“I don’t want to be rude,” she insisted. He sighed.

“I don’t think that’s possible.” She flushed a deeper shade. It left him feeling miserable.

“I met the most interesting man this morning,” she continued, well-trained to Sylvain’s reluctant role in their mealtime conversations. “He told me that he’s come from the capital.” Sylvain glanced at the snow tumbling outside a nearby window. It wouldn’t have been a cheery trip, no matter how close the duchy was to Fhirdiad.

“He asked me if I was your sister,” she continued with a laugh. “I think he meant to tease me.” It wouldn’t be so strange of a mistake, he wagered, eyeing the familiar tone of her ruby-colored hair. “I told him that I wasn’t aware of my father having traveled this far south before. That seemed to win over his favor.”

“He doesn’t sound like the kind of man you should be favoring at all,” he offered dryly. She shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen someone like him before. He was very pretty.”

“_Pretty_?” She nodded.

“Beautiful, really, and with the most unusual color of hair — like a holly leaf.” Sylvain frowned, the sweet bread in his mouth turning to ash against his tongue.

_For fuck’s sake_.

“This man — did he travel alone?” She thought on his question for a moment, her eyes darting to the ceiling.

“No,” she realized aloud. “There was another man with him all dressed in armor. A guard, I suppose. He told me his title but it was a word I didn’t recognize. You must know him, of course. He said his name was—”

“Linhardt,” Sylvain snapped icily. Her face brightened with another smile.

“Yes, that was it! Is he a friend of yours as well?”

“No. Don’t speak with him again,” he added tightly. “Not him or that man he was with.” Her brow furrowed as he stood. He usually tempered himself far better around her, but the thought of that insufferable mage lurking at Felix’s bedside had made such a thing impossible. “They’re snakes, the both of them.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Portia called after him as he strode towards the door.

“You haven’t,” he insisted through his teeth.

“Won’t you eat something more?”

He stopped to take up the cloak Ingrid had left him, turning to offer it in Portia’s direction.

“Don’t catch a chill,” he told her as she took it from him. Her look of concern had very nearly bled into frustration — and better that it did. It would be a relief for her to finally grow angry with him instead of showering him with her usual bottomless affection.

Still, she didn’t protest further as he stormed into the hall. Maybe it was because she knew already where it was he was headed, or maybe it was just because even she eventually would have to tire of his grey moods. Whatever it was, it didn’t slow his approach as he crossed the castle towards Felix’s room again. He’d nearly made it to his door before Ingrid sidestepped him to trap him against a wall.

“Sylvain,” she snapped, reading him as deftly as she always had before. Age hadn’t made her any taller. It was easy for him to spot the flicker of Linhardt’s dark robes above her head as the mage slipped into Felix’s room. There was a familiar scrape of plate as well, no doubt that bastard Caspar, and him no doubt grinning at Felix’s bed as Sylvain was relegated outside.

“You can’t be serious,” he argued, his eyes still fixed hotly on the door.

“Listen to me. It’s some sort of curse. Do you understand? Linhardt can help.”

“How, exactly?”

“Would you prefer to find another mage who so happens to dabble in black magic?” She braced her hands against her hips, bowing closer towards him as if she meant to bite him. “Hm? Is it worth that sort of gamble just to justify your...” She shook her head, unable to find the proper words to label that nasty glimmer in his eye. “Just stay here. Alright?”

“Why can’t— what the hell is fucking _Caspar_ doing in there if I have to stand in the goddamned hall?”

“Caspar won’t get in the way.” She took a testing step backwards, her eyes still steady on him. “Stay here, Sylvain. I’ll find you when I know more.” He watched her wordlessly as she slowly turned to enter into the room herself.

“Fucking hell,” he hissed, sucking in a breath to stop himself from dashing his knuckles against the wall. Not that he needed to break his hand, naturally, and not like fucking Linhardt would help him if he did. He sunk into his haunches instead, kneading at his brow with his fingertips as he tried to decide just what the hell he was supposed to do next. He held the pose for a long moment before glancing up to spot a pair of blue eyes watching him from across the hall.

“Castor,” he called out to him, feeling a little winded. “What are you doing over there?” He looked down the corridor for signs of that governess of his and found nothing but late afternoon shadows and flickering braziers working in earnest to warm the frosty halls. The boy sniffled in reply, his face crinkling with embarrassment. Sylvain bit back a groan, not certain that he was in the spirit for hunting down someone to whisk him away.

Castor padded towards him before he had the chance to make a decision. Sylvain’s brows tightened slightly as he sat at his side. The so-called squire fiddled with the cuffs of his navy trousers and made a valiant effort of balancing the beads of his tears on his lashes so that they didn’t spill across his cheeks.

“Lady Mildred says that knights don’t cry,” he admitted to Sylvain finally, his reedy voice a little raspy. He scrubbed his sleeve across his face and sniffled.

“I don’t know about that,” Sylvain replied. “Lady Mildred doesn’t look like much of a knight.” He felt a reluctant smile creep across his lips as the boy hiccuped at the idea.

“She says that boys need to be brave,” Castor insisted, tugging at the laces of his boots.

“You know, the bravest boy I’ve ever known used to cry all of the time.” Castor peeked up at him, looking unconvinced. Sylvain nodded.

“You’re lying.”

“That wouldn’t be a very knightly thing to do, now would it?” That seemed to resonate with the boy. He mimicked Sylvain’s sage nod.

“It’s alright to be frightened,” Sylvain continued, tipping his chin towards Felix’s closed door. “I’m frightened, too.” Castor sniffed again.

“Really?”

“Really. But if we sit here together I can watch out for you, and you can watch out for me, alright?”

“Alright,” Castor murmured as he scooted closer to Sylvain’s side. He lifted his arm and rested it lightly against the boy’s thin shoulders, his chest aching as he felt the tremors of his trembling. Perhaps he should have told him a story or a joke, but each attempt died in his throat. Still, the boy seemed satisfied to just sit there, and Sylvain suspected it was for the same reason that he’d lingered there as well.

He listened to his huffy breathing until it settled. Then Castor’s head tipped back into the crook of his arm as he fell asleep, no doubt exhausted from his crying. Sylvain focused next on the low rumble of voices inside the room, his jaw tensing as he endeavored to make out words. There was Ingrid’s voice, quiet, melodic; a brassy interlude from Caspar, perhaps some sort of encouragement; and that stormy smell that came with spell casting, familiar and haunting. His mind was filled with memories of searing flashes and licking flames and did little to settle the wild tempo of his heartbeat.

Castor twitched in his sleep. Sylvain wondered if he was dreaming of the day his family had been wiped from the page, his own memories stirred by the miasma hanging in the air. It was not so different from that morning in Duscur long ago. _The same old terrible story_, Ingrid’s voice whispered in his ear.

It didn’t have to be.

Sylvain leaned his head against the wall and stared up into the ceiling. The boy could just be a boy, not some vessel filled with vengeance. If Felix lived he would no doubt teach him that lesson. And maybe when his own child was born Sylvain would bury that wicked lance of his and the curse of his crest along with it. All of them could hide together in the north and pretend the world was full of nothing but silvery frost and evergreens. 

It was just that he needed to live. _Gods damn it, please._

A tight pang pulsed at the center of his chest as a new voice murmured from behind the wall. It was quiet, nearly a figment, but Sylvain had been trained to it like the whistle to a hound. His eyes pricked as he waited, watching, each inch of his body tight with anticipation. There was the shuffle of feet, the drag of a chair, more muffled conversation from the three voices who had been there before.

Finally the knob turned. Ingrid emerged, her face flushed and softening further as she spotted Castor huddled beneath Sylvain’s arm. She stepped two paces across the hallway, her eyes settling on his. He realized that he’d been holding his breath for perhaps too long.

“It’s fine,” she managed finally with breathy laughter. “Linhardt’s managed it. He’s woken.” He felt each winched muscle in his limbs loosen with a dizzying wave of relief.

“You mean it?”

“Of course,” she replied, her brows arching as her face filled with something made of joy and pity and something a little sad. “He’s dazed, but Linhardt says he should regain his senses over the next few days. What’s important now is that he eats and drinks and...” Her fingers fluttered to her lips as if she didn’t quite believe the sudden turn herself.

“I think,” she continued more carefully, “that we should focus on that first. It’s been nearly five days, you know? So that he can recover and then...”

“You don’t want me to see him,” Sylvain realized aloud, something crunching into a painful shape in that place where he heart should have been. Ingrid winced.

“It’s not that. It’s just that I don’t want him to be distracted. You understand. I’m not saying that you should leave. Please don’t leave,” she amended quickly, reminding Sylvain that perhaps she still had some dredges of affection leftover for him as well. “Just that I think we should wait a few days.”

His teeth ground in his ears. _Distracted_. Well, yes, that was what he was, wasn’t it? A distraction lurking at the perimeter of this little family they’d built right under his nose. He swallowed a bitter breath of air and nodded slowly.

“Alright,” he relented. “Whatever you want, Ingrid.”

“It’s not about what I want.” He waved away her explanation with the flick of his hand. He was too tired for that. With all of the talk of sleeping that had filled the duchy for days he hadn’t done so much of it himself. He glanced down at Castor at the thought, gingerly shifting his arm until he’d managed to stand with the little boy propped against his shoulder.

“I’ll take him back to his room,” he offered Ingrid. “Where is it?” She glanced at her toes, still wincing.

“It’s Glenn’s old room.” For some reason that pricked at him as well.

“Alright.” He turned to hunt it out.

“Sylvain...” Ingrid called out to him as he traveled down the hall, but they both knew there wasn’t much left for her to say.

* * *

Castor’s governess was hovering at his door to greet him. She helped him tuck the boy into his bed, tutting quietly with worry as she smoothed his sheets beneath his chin. He left her with a nod, returning to the hall again and feeling suddenly cold without the boy’s little body tucked against his arm. It was late. He wondered if Portia was still awake. He hoped she wasn’t, that she’d learned his ways well enough by now to not worry over him any longer. 

“Fuck,” he sighed to the empty hall. What a fucking mess everything was. He ruffled his fingers through his hair and paced forward without a destination in mind.

First came the guest wing, familiar from all of his time spent visiting as a boy. There was the room his father had always been given, graced with a pretty view of the greenhouse outside. Beside it was where his mother had slept when she was alive, already too ill to share a bed. Miklan had often taken the next room over, and always with the door locked from the outside to guard against his endless attempts at pushing Sylvain down stairs and out of open windows.

He lingered at the door of the room he’d sometimes called his own. It was draped in sheets now, unused and full of dust. Still, there was something inviting in it, as haunted as it looked. His boots echoed against the stony corridor as he traced the old path he’d always taken as a boy in nights like these. He shivered now as he had then, his age-old loneliness transcribed into a chill that was far easier to define. Down the corridor he went and then through a short door usually relegated to the scullery maids tasked with stoking early-morning fires; and then through a dark stairwell nearly the temperature of the winter twilight outside. Here was the second-story parlor where Duke Rodrigue had sometimes challenged him to chess, his eyes twinkling as he let him win; the little gallery full of portraits of dark-haired men all scowling and serious.

Two more doors and then came the third he’d unwittingly been drawn back towards. When he’d been a boy Felix had always left it crooked open for him so that he could slip quietly inside. He’d been too old to sleep with him the way that he had, a practice he’d finally cut short at nine when Miklan had caught him and revealed his secret to their ruinously mortified mother. It wasn’t that he didn’t know that it was wrong, just that it had been the only thing left to soothe him.

And so maybe he had never learned how to behave.

He turned the knob slowly, the muscles in his back tensed and aching as he waited for Ingrid to storm upon him and cast him out. She never came. The room inside was dark and quiet. If not for the circle of empty chairs abandoned at Felix’s bedside he would have been convinced that perhaps it had all been a dream, and that Felix was still doomed to slumber evermore.

Still, he was asleep now. Maybe that was better. Sylvain convinced himself that it was. He closed the door quietly at his back before tiptoeing to the bed. His pulse crashed like twin timpani in his ears as he sunk to his knees and gripped timidly at the edge of the mattress. When he’d been a boy it’d been so easy to slip into those warm sheets. Not that it had ended there — as a man it had been even better. Until he’d ruined it.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered finally. Felix’s dark lashes fluttered in his sleep. Sylvain crossed his palms one atop the other and settled his chin against them, his eyes steady across the soft expanse of the bed as he struggled to think of anything better to say. To sate, to promise, to doom him, even — _something_.

Nothing came. He drifted off to sleep instead, dark and dreamless and ice cold. And maybe Felix’s curse was still lingering in the shadows beneath his bed, and perhaps it had slipped into his body next. It felt as though he slept for days, months, centuries. But when he woke again it was still that same moonless night and he was still crouched in a painful hunch at the side of Felix’s bed, and yet in this new moment something warm was teasing at his brow.

_Fingers_, he realized, first drowsily and then with a more alert curiosity. His bleary eyes focused slowly on a pale shape that nearly disappeared against the white of the sheets. 

_A ghost_, an unhelpful voice suggested from some corner of his mind. _Alright_, another agreed. The ghost was brushing his long fringe from his eyes. It was strangely doting for a poltergeist.

“Are you growing out your hair?” The ghost teased him in a hoarse voice, his tone suggesting that he didn’t approve of the idea. Sylvain scrunched his eyes, his thoughts still lagging as he tried to place just where it was he was.

“Felix,” he gasped suddenly, ripping his hands free from beneath his chin to snatch at his wrist before he disappeared.

“Sylvain,” he replied drolly from his comma-shaped drape along the side of the bed.

“You’re — I,” Sylvain stammered, his grip tightening even as he realized that he wasn’t supposed to be there. “You’re supposed to eat,” he managed finally. Felix’s brow crumpled incredulously.

“Not _now_,” he insisted, closing his fingers around Sylvain’s arm as he tugged his own back. “Come on. You’re as cold as ice.”

He followed Felix’s pull into the sheets.

“My boots,” he protested.

“It’s fine.” He flicked a coverlet in his direction before sinking back against his pillow, seemingly exhausted by the task of chasing Sylvain into the bed. Sylvain hovered in his spot, still gripping at him even as his mind insisted that he’d broken some rule and needed to escape.

“You’re alright,” he managed next, this time whispered.

“Apparently,” Felix replied.

“You hate me.” It was less of a question than a reminder. He heard Felix suck in a deep sigh.

“Not entirely.” Something stubborn began to crack inside him with his sleepy reassurance. Sylvain inched closer, a shiver coursing through his body from the delicious heat captured between the sheets.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked. Felix’s free arm snaked forward to snatch at his collar. He found himself suddenly planted in the pillows himself, great overstuffed things slashed black-and-white by Felix’s hair.

“Not now,” the man repeated. “Go to sleep.”

Sylvain relented, lurching forward to bury his nose in the crook of his throat. Felix’s arms draped over his back, heavy and warm. He didn’t dare to move. If he did perhaps the night’s enchantment would dissipate and leave him alone on the cold slate again. As it was, it was enough; a memory repeated, tender and precious, of two boys clinging to each other in the dark.


	13. Pickpocketing

Sylvain’s nose woke before his body did. While his mind still lingered on his half-formed dreams his nostrils filled with the smell of sweet leather polish and the toasted smoke of a fire, bolstered underneath by the earthy scent of sweat nearly as salty as it must have tasted. Altogether it formed a tantalizing bouquet that lured him in closer by the tip of his nose, itself slightly crooked after having been broken some half-dozen years before. 

_Good_, his rousing mind decided. _Soft_, it added as he shifted closer towards that warm spot at his side. This part smelled like cocoa and talcum powder, and for some reason reminded him of the color black. _Black_, his thoughts echoed dreamily; yes, black, just like his hair.

His ears tuned into the proper frequency next, focusing first on the crackle of the hearth. He could hear the fire lapping into some branch added too green; the fizzle of steam and the pop that came after followed by a soft thud as the kindling collapsed into a new shape. There too was the eternal creaking of that ancient-built place. It set a cheerful tempo for the steady breathing in his ear, not timed to the rise of his own chest but to the one tucked against his arm.

_Morning_, he decided next, as judged from that red glow lurking behind the curtain of his eyelids. The thought chased away some of the cobwebs still stringing between his ears. Morning, and him in a bed that he’d been chased from. That meant that he was supposed to be awake.

He did so reluctantly, at last becoming aware of his stiff limbs not yet soothed by a night finally spent atop a mattress. A tender feeling blossomed in his chest as he recognized the round of one of Felix’s knees jutting between his stacked shins. It was underpinned by a familiar guilt that he wasn’t yet fully willing to examine.

_Morning_, he reminded himself again, and finally pried his lashes apart.

Two eyes were staring back at him, dark blue and nearly velveteen.

“Fuck,” he gasped in surprise, his body bracing into a stiff shape as he made out the person belonging to those eyes: long and lithe and draped in robes that would have looked villainous on anyone else, with legs crossed primly one atop the other and a set of fingers fanned over his chin, the tip of one at the center of his lips so that just the corner pressed them cleft. 

“You’ve very nearly made me jealous,” Linhardt drawled, his voice treacly and low.

“Fucking Linhardt,” Sylvain managed chokingly. That made Linhardt chuckle. He felt Felix slowly stirring awake beside him. He seemed as hesitant to rouse as Sylvain had been himself.

“Tell me,” Linhardt continued coyly, “with this arrangement of yours, is the idea that your wives are to act surprised when they find you together in bed?” His eyes darted upwards before Sylvain had the chance to respond. Sylvain cringed as he heard the door behind him creak open, first slowly and then kicked with more authority to clatter against the wall. Felix groaned as the sound jolted him more properly awake.

“Gods _damn_ it, Sylvain,” Ingrid’s voice hissed. He wondered if she could still reach him if he crawled under the bed.

“Shut up,” Felix croaked miserably at all of them, perhaps regretting the fact that he’d made lovers out of any of them. That fact was not lost on Sylvain, either, who felt a very unusual pinch of mortification ping low in his gut.

“Duchess,” Linhardt greeted her neatly. Sylvain did not mimic the welcome, still petrified in his spot as he tried to determine if it were better to flee or to just let Ingrid strangle him there against the sheets. Her footsteps clipped across the floor, followed after by the clatter of something as she sat it on one of the bedside tables. The smell of cinnamon and something baked teased him: _breakfast_. His stomach growled.

“Out,” Ingrid ordered as she ripped the bedding from Sylvain’s stolen half of the bed, her face filling with no uncertain look of relief to see that he was at least clothed. It puckered with her next breath as she noted his boots and the flecks of dried mud they’d left gathered at the tucked ends of the sheets.

“You as well,” she continued with a schoolmaster’s tone as her eyes settled on Linhardt, his role in saving her husband not eclipsing whatever mischievous goal he had in mind now. Her order left him looking a little disappointed. 

“It will do none of us any good if he starves to death,” she contended, stacking her hands against her hips. “And I know that you’re awake, Felix.” The named man sunk a little deeper beneath his duvet. Sylvain, reluctantly, and at last charmed by the familiar scenario they now found themselves sucked within, rolled to his feet and stood. “_Honestly_,” Ingrid managed next, sighing. He waved his palms at her in surrender, flinching slightly as she shooed him towards the door.

He thought to give some farewell to the dark hair hiding in the sheets but decided against it, content with whatever truce they’d reached the night before and not foolish enough to yet test its limits. Felix seemed to be of a similar mind, although he liked to think that he caught him peeking at him as he marched out into the hall.

It took him twelve steps to realize that Linhardt was following him. It made a new ember of annoyance flicker to life in his chest. He turned, eyes already narrowed as they settled on the man. Linhardt returned the gesture with a half-bored look of his own.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, it is that time of day that one generally breaks their fast,” he offered tritely. “I can hear that stomach of yours. We might as well go together. Not that you’re my choice company, mind you.” Sylvain shaped his features into the proper look to tell him that the feeling was mutual. Linhardt shrugged and continued forward towards the kitchens, and with Sylvain (filled with a growing regret) now trailing at his heels.

Still. It was better to beg for something quick from the castle’s cooks than to endure a proper meal, and particularly because he was certain Portia was lurking nearby to share it with him. He was still too drowsy to piece together a proper explanation for why he was still in yesterday’s clothes, and his hair mussed and messy besides. He and the mage both paid the aproned fleet of women wide-eyed looks and were rewarded with an armful of hot rolls fresh from the oven and two flagons of cider.

It was too much to carry alone, and so Sylvain relented to the horrid idea of sharing the meal with Linhardt in a quiet corner set deep in the corridor leading to the hibernating gardens outside.

“How did you do it?” Sylvain barked the question after he’d finished two rolls and couldn’t manage to swallow his voice any longer. Linhardt took his time in finishing his drink before glancing over at him. He seemed amused that Sylvain’s curiosity had finally outworn his pettiness.

“Do what, exactly?”

“The curse,” Sylvain snapped. “What was it? How did you manage to wake Felix up?” He shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve seen it before. If that duke of yours ever bothered to listen to me he could have avoided it entirely. _Be careful_, I tell him, and of course he does the opposite. I’d like to think he does it to spite me, but I unfortunately know better than that,” he sniffed the last few words, seeming perhaps a little hurt, if in a maddeningly theatric way. “If I wasn’t so fond of him I think I would be forced to admit that he is rather like you, you know. Entirely single-minded.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” Sylvain reminded him tightly.

“I don’t find it so terribly fun to do what you want,” Linhardt argued with a pout. “Mind you, that’s quite a feat to pull; I am generally keen for a strong hand. And goodness, you’ve become so very dull, haven’t you? I remember you to at least be amusing, what with all of your skirt-chasing. Now you’re just another grim man, aren’t you? Surely the north has enough of those already.”

“How disappointing for you,” came Sylvain’s dry reply. Linhardt nodded in agreement.

“Although I suppose I have misspoken. That wife is yours _is_ quite lovely — even a creature like me can admit to something like that. I can understand the allure, is what I mean to say.” Sylvain closed his eyes and focused on the pinch of rolling them to stop himself from cracking his flagon against the mage’s skull.

“The curse,” he insisted through his teeth.

“The curse,” Linhardt parroted, clicking his tongue. “Yes, well, alright. Have it your way, then. In Enbarr, when we were killing dear old Edelgard, do you remember seeing a corps of mages wearing masks? They didn’t linger long, not after they saw that their necks might have been on the line.”

Sylvain thought on the idea. He tried not to remember much from that day, to be honest, or from the weeks that had preceded it. Still, what Linhardt said seemed to ring true. He did remember them, lurking in the shadows in places he couldn’t quite reach, all dark-robed and wearing masks with the long cruel beaks of birds.

“Yes. Maybe. What of it?”

“Surely I don’t need to spell it out for you.” Linhardt took another bite, savoring Sylvain’s annoyed anticipation. “They call themselves _Those Who Slither in the Dark_. Quite the mouthful, isn’t it?” Somehow the phrase became suggestive in his voice. Sylvain smirked. “I don’t know what they saw in Edelgard, but whatever it was, it was not her better nature. Killing her had little to do with them, regrettably. Now it seems they’ve set their sights on our two kings left behind. So far they’ve been sloppy — and His Highness is quite skilled at culling, so I wouldn’t let yourself become too concerned. Still, they had a lucky break when they came upon the royal envoy in the Throat. Lucky until they were cut down, of course.”

“And they cursed Felix?”

“Yes, as it so happens. By accident or by design, of that I’m not quite certain. Not that it truly matters. I imagine Dimitri was their preferred target, but the outcome would have been the same. Not that you’ll be so interested to hear the specifics, I wager, but I’ve done some research into the matter and am of a mind to think that any bearer of a crest needn’t be too terribly preoccupied by such a thing. A man without one would surely be killed by the nasty little hex they’ve conjured up, but with one they simply — well, you saw it. They’re just treated to a nap. Not so terrible a thing at all.”

“Not if you can wake up from it,” Sylvain corrected him sourly. Linhardt shrugged again.

“I am a brilliant man,” he said, “but even I can admit that what I’ve done here is not so remarkable. If you and that duchess weren’t so nasty to me, perhaps I’d teach it to some of those second-rate mages of yours.”

“For someone so abused, you certainly traveled quickly from the capital.” Linhardt pursed his lips and nodded, not too proud to admit that Sylvain was right.

“It’s not as if our precious duke treats me the way I’d like, but that isn’t to say that he’s _nasty_, either. Of course I came.” Sylvain swirled his cider, quite aware of the challenge Linhardt left unsaid but not so thoughtless that he wouldn’t thank him for saving Felix, either.

“You know,” Linhardt continued, his playful tone suddenly dissolved. “I’ve been telling him to leave you for years. You and I both know well enough that it isn’t because I’m not good at sharing.” Sylvain frowned, his eyes still centered on his drink dangling from his fingers. “Not that he would ask me the question now, but if he did I would still advise him to do the same. Eventually I do imagine you will do something to him that even I cannot set right again. Still, I’m not mad enough to continue on pushing the same boulder around just for it to crash down on my head again.” Sylvain tilted his head to the side, shooting a wry glare in his direction to signal that he was quickly growing tired of his meandering speech. 

Linhardt bowed his shoulders in defeat, brushing the crumbs from his palms afterwards to stand from the sill they’d turned into their seat.

“What I mean to say,” he added, “is that you owe him quite the debt for his poor decision making. Do try not to muck it up.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Sylvain replied without any real venom as Linhardt began to trail down the hall. It seemed as satisfying a response as anything, and left them both strangely at ease.

* * *

As insufferable as he was, Sylvain thought on Linhardt’s parting words again later as he trailed back towards Felix’s room. It wasn’t as if he’d ever intended to be cruel to Felix. In fact, that had been the _point_. Still, he was right. He’d been clumsy with so much of what had built the relationship between them. Everything that should have been tender had been sharp-toothed instead. And he, of anyone, should have known better; after all, he was a master of sweet nothings.

Of course, that was largely he reason why he’d abandoned them when he was with him. They were just empty words, bright-colored candies that all tasted the same after you sucked the color from them, and what he’d felt for Felix had always been built from different stuff — something that demanded honesty, even when that honesty was sour.

But there was a balance, maybe, and his scales had perhaps been tipped a bit uneven from the start.

And how many times had he prepared some apology for him that had crumbled in his mouth before he’d had the chance to offer it up to him? Too many times, that was the answer. This time he would tell him. Even if he didn’t want to listen. It was important. Linhardt was right, the bastard; he couldn’t keep fucking up.

He drew in a deep breath and closed his fingers around the cold knob of the door. It swung open without resistance. Everything was going well until he spotted Felix stranded in the center of his bed, each free inch of it covered with books and loose leafs of paper, and then that steadying breath of his turned into laughter instead.

“Are you... wearing _glasses_?”

What he should have said was something about how the duchy would certainly survive one more day without him worrying about something, and certainly the kingdom as well, but Felix’s stubborn attachment to his paperwork was not nearly as amusing as those silver-rimmed things balanced so low on the delicate slope of his nose. He glared at him through the crystal of their lenses as Sylvain closed the door behind him.

“Don’t say a word,” he warned him before glancing back at a long ledger draped over his lap. Sylvain snorted another breath of laughter and hunted out a spot to sit at the foot of the bed. _Harvest report_s, he realized as he scanned Felix’s collection. Not so terribly pressing when the world was covered in ice. _Typical._

“Honestly, Lex.” Felix snatched the glasses from his face to focus a more proper scowl in his direction in retribution for the unearthed nickname.

“It wouldn’t kill you to be lazy, you know.”

“You do enough of that for the both of us,” Felix contested. It was an uninspired retort, plagiarized from their childhood bickering when the accusation had been more honest. Sylvain ignored it to admire the look of him instead. His hair was loose against his shoulders, thick and shiny and silk-smooth. He’d dressed himself in a scarlet housecoat after Ingrid had cast Sylvain away. Its rich saturation, challenged only by the inky darkness of his hair, made his skin look porcelain-white in contrast. Like a doll, nearly, and the only one ever made to scowl three-quarters of the time, and surely with the highest kill count of all the rest combined.

_Fuck_. He’d missed him so much.

Sylvain crawled closer to him. Felix cocked his head to the side, perhaps preparing for him to make good on that hungry look of his. He very nearly did, a pile of discarded notes crunching beneath his palm as he leaned towards him — and stopped just short as his guilt quickly sobered him again.

_Right._

_Shit._

He cleared his throat in a feeble attempt to start breathing again.

“Felix,” he started, more meekly than he’d intended. His shoulders hitched as Felix suddenly gripped him by the chin, his fingers strong and steadying.

“Do you think that I don’t understand why you married that woman?” Sylvain’s tongue worked inside his mouth to try to form an adequate reply.

“No,” he managed lamely. Felix’s eyes narrowed. He wasn’t certain just what emotion had spurred them to do so.

“Is her child yours?” His stomach lurched into a pinched shape.

“Yes,” he muttered.

“How many times did you sleep with her?”

“Once.”

“_Once_?”

“Once,” Sylvain insisted more boldly. “On our wedding night.” Felix studied him for a moment, seemed satisfied that he was telling the truth no matter how absurd it sounded.

“And do you understand why I was upset that you didn’t tell me?”

“_Upset,_” Sylvain countered, “Felix, you avoided me for over half a year.” Felix’s brows ticked lower. _Not amused,_ they told him, easy to decode.

“Yes, I understand,” Sylvain relented glumly.

“So what are you doing here now?”

“What?” Sylvain breathed the question, a chill freezing his heart. _At least let me apologize,_ he wanted to stammer, but once again the words cluttered painfully in his throat.

“What exactly is it that you want from me?”

“Want from you,” Sylvain repeated miserably. “I don’t want anything. I just,” he added quickly before Felix could add on another bitter reply, “I just want to be here with you. I missed you. After everything...I mean, fuck, what’s the point, otherwise?” All of his carefully formed missives tangled into a dark scribble at the back of his throat. “I do stupid fucking things. Alright? It’s not like it’s on purpose. They always seem right at the time, it’s just... And it wasn’t to hurt you. You have to believe me. I love you, Felix.”

The pinch of his fingers against his jaw was starting to hurt. Part of him longed for it. Better yet for him to crack his knuckles against his temple._ Go on,_ he wanted to beg next, _do it._Anything would have been more satisfying than that stare of his, steady and impossible to read.

“I don’t want to leave,” he stammered on. “Even if it’s not like before.” A childish stubbornness began to fill his chest. “I’m not going to just leave you behind.”

There was that old tic of his: that slight fold at the corner of his eyes, the clench of his jaw tightening.

“Oh, alright,” Felix sighed. The two simple words left Sylvain dumbfounded.

“...what?” Surely there was more to it than that. Sylvain gathered a breath to contest as much. It spilled into Felix’s mouth as he wrenched him forward to kiss him.

_Wait_, perhaps he should have said; _let’s settle this properly_. And it wasn’t like Felix wasn’t angry. That was as evident in the sharp bite of his teeth as it had been in his dour tone. But he was still kissing him, and in a way that had quickly simmered his blood into a boil, and Sylvain was so very new to this whole practice of apologizing.

So Sylvain shoved the books from his lap instead, ignoring the clatter of them as they fell to the floor to focus on the ties of his housecoat instead. His pulse hammered in his ears as he stripped the thing away, his fingers warming from the heat of Felix’s body. He needed to see it, he decided even after his attention had already been turned to the buttons of his thin shirt. Had to be convinced that he was real and not that pale ghost he’d seen the night before, and that he wouldn’t push him away as he reached for him.

Felix drew him closer.

Sylvain began to lose track of the things that didn’t matter: the button that Felix ripped loose from the stitching of his collar, the crunch of a quill snapping beneath his knee. He focused instead on running his tongue along the familiar map of scars criss-crossing his chest, reveling in the way that Felix’s breathing had started to hitch in rhythm with his teasing, and the way that the butts of his palms were digging into his shoulders as he begged him towards his navel.

His skin tasted like salt and bland soap. It was delicious, left him feeling desperate.

“Sylvain,” Felix gasped as he tugged his pants to his knees. The sound of his name made him shiver. He looked up at him, his lips still pressed to the taut skin low on Felix’s stomach as he matched his half-lidded stare. His cheeks had darkened into that rare blush of his that Sylvain had often daydreamed about when he was alone.

“Say it again,” Sylvain pleaded as he gripped the base of his cock. Felix’s hips twitched as he took him in his mouth.

“Sylvain,” he moaned obediently, his fingers twining into his hair. He let them press him lower, and no matter that they weren’t so gentle as they pushed and tugged.

He’d lock the door, he decided; drag the bed itself against it to bar them from the world. Anything to keep him grasping onto him like that. He looked up at him again through the blur of his watering eyes and shuddered at the sight of his victory: that scowl of Felix’s now long lost and replaced by a blissful look of pleasure that made whatever punishment Sylvain was owed for his indiscretions entirely worthwhile.

“Sylvain.”

And maybe it was particularly wicked to do such a thing in a room half-filled with relics from their childhood, but maybe he was just a wicked fucking man. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. Just wanted to make him happy; and by _him_ he wasn’t entirely ashamed to admit that he meant the both of them.

“Sylv—wait, _stop_.” He took him deeper instead, his Adam’s apple bouncing as he did his best not to choke.

“_Oh_!”

“Sylvain!” He gasped as Felix suddenly ripped at his hair with a different sort of grip and wrenched him upwards.

“What the fuck,” he sputtered, wincing as he drug the back of his hand against his mouth. Felix stared back at him wordlessly, chest heaving, before his eyes darted over his shoulder.

“What?” Sylvain repeated the question, not sure if he should tilt his voice into an annoyed or worried tone. “What is it?”

“Fuck,” is all that Felix offered breathlessly in reply.

* * *

Of all the things Portia had learned about the south, one of her most useful lessons had been about tea.

In Sreng they could hardly grow wheat, let alone tea leaves. Although her father had imported some of the stuff for her to try she, like most of her people, preferred the sour mash of their ale to the bland (_delicate_, the Fodlanese said) taste of that half-colored stuff. Still, it was a complicated thing, as most things from Fodlan were, and she had dedicated no small amount of time to learning the different leaves and flavors and times at which they must be steeped.

Sylvain liked the bright taste of bergamot, she learned first. Not that he would have corrected her if she brought him a pot of something different, she wagered, just that he seemed more eager to drink it when she did. Ingrid had been her second conquest. She’d been eager to earn her favor since she’d first met her at her wedding. And, although she’d hardly wanted misfortune to fall upon the poor duke (whomever he was, still hidden behind his bedroom door), she’d been secretly pleased that Sylvain’s trip south had afforded her that opportunity. Mint, she learned after spotting the woman clipping leaves of the same plant from her strange little garden under glass; mint tea was what she preferred.

She’d shared four cups of it with her since her discovery, each sip hopefully bringing her one step closer to the possibility of claiming her first friend. It was a little silly to be so excited about such a thing — even she knew that. But still. It was something to look forward to, an easy topic to think about instead of obsessing over the abstract dread of motherhood.

So when she’d learned that the duke was well again and already burying himself back in his work it was obvious that she owed him a kettle of tea as well. She’d stolen away into the kitchens to ask what it was he preferred, deciding that a bit of research was better suited than blindly testing her theories against him herself. One of the girls who worked there had procured a satchel of something spiced for her and promised that it would do just the trick. She’d then helped her arrange a tray laden with a pewter kettle and two pretty little silver cups. No sugar and no cream, the girl suggested with a wink; and all the better. She didn’t favor either of those herself.

_A good sign,_ she decided as she carefully balanced the tray up a set of stairs. And if the duke had been charmed by Ingrid and had such a strong friendship with the margrave then perhaps they had more in common than not. _Two_ friends seemed a high reward for her first visit to the countryside but, well, there was no harm in being optimistic.

Just that she should have knocked.

It would have been even a better lesson than all of her studying over leaves.

“_Oh_!” She swung the door into the duke’s room open and then shut it closed just as quickly, for some reason butting her toe into the jamb so that it didn’t slam. She stepped back a pace and stared into the neat arrangement of cups and saucers still balanced between her palms, her cheeks growing hotter than the steam drifting from the kettle’s spout.

It was just that she hadn’t expected it, is all.

After all, she’d spoken with Ingrid not half an hour earlier, and with her deeply engaged in a rather aggressive pruning of a scrawny rosebush in the greenhouse. Not that it was surprising that a wife would be so... _relieved_ that her husband was well again, just that it was quite a feat that she had beaten her there.

And it was just that she hadn’t thought that the duchess would have such a broad back. Not that she was dainty. Naturally, Portia had heard all about her exploits in the war. A proper warrior, her. But still, she had a slender enough build — _womanly_, that is.

And blonde. A true southerner, Ingrid was. Not like Portia with her red hair. Red like that head that had been bobbing between that pale man’s crooked legs.

Red like hers and her father’s, and perhaps in need of a cut.

“_Kattash_,” she breathed finally, her heart hammering in her ears. It was one of the few Sreng words she’d ever learned. It didn’t have a proper translation into Fodlanese, but if it had it wouldn’t have been polite. 


	14. Pretty Foolish

It was a peculiar situation. 

Of course, Felix would have preferred to call it by a different name. Infuriating, for one. Exhausting worked well, too. Everything had been exhausting since he’d made that stupid misstep in Fodlan’s Throat which had resulted in him becoming the recipient of that horrid, bone-tingling spell. It had been satisfying to cut down the bastard who’d flung it in his direction (perhaps more satisfying than it should have been; and was it that he’d been away from a fight for too long, or that he shouldn’t have returned to one altogether?), but the fatigue that had followed after had been unpleasant.

Unpleasant when he’d battled to pry his eyes open on their ride home, and annoying when he’d felt his head bobbing as he read over the mountain of correspondence waiting for him in his study, and downright bewildering when suddenly he was in his bed and unable to move.

Then it hadn’t been much of anything at all — a deep black pit to swim in as he tried to remember just what it was to feel. But then he’d woken to a strange reception: Ingrid, looking so relieved he’d wanted to ask her just what it was she’d won; and Caspar, a new scar under his left eye since he’d seen him last, and grinning; and Linhardt looking characteristically sleepy himself, but not so much that he’d missed his triumphant smile.

As it turned out, being cursed wasn’t that different from being drunk, or at least drunk in the way that it always happened to him. Just like drinking, it snuck up from a recklessness he’d overlooked and built until it made his head spin. The night that came after his reawakening was a hangover that left him feeling listless and a little guilty. He’d slept so that he didn’t have to inspect the feelings too closely. When he woke again, however, a double serving of affection and something biting filled his chest as he spotted a familiar head of fiery hair bowed over at his bedside.

And what a nostalgic sight it had been, as if he had suddenly shrunken to half-size and had been transported back to a time that had been both more simple and more complex. He’d loved it when Sylvain had snuck into his room at night as a little boy. It had made him feel important. Young as he had been, he’d seen the way that the older boy was always cringing around his stern and unpleasant father. And although Sylvain was always so cheery with Ingrid and Dimitri when they played knights together in the yard, Felix had recognized that flinching look faceted in his eyes. He was lying, just like Glenn did when he quarreled with their father. The only time that look seemed to disappear was when he was with him — not that he didn’t lie then, of course, but just that when he did it was obvious to the both of them.

Whatever the word was for that warm, fuzzy feeling that’d trickled from his ears all the way down to his toes when they were together, he’d been certain that it was precious. He’d felt it best when they’d hidden together beneath the downy cloud of his duvet after he’d come to seek refuge from a nightmare. As a man Felix knew exactly how to name that feeling, and his careful study had confirmed that it still manifested best when paired with pillows and sheets.

So he’d bitten back that old ache of his, nearly as ancient as his love for Sylvain, and had hauled him into his bed. And maybe he’d been satisfied to see that Sylvain at least seemed troubled by everything that had happened, or maybe he would have preferred if he’d just lied to him instead; swept every messy piece of their relationship beneath the sheets as well so that they could just find pleasure in one another again.

Honestly, it was likely a combination of both notions, and he was too tired to decide just which one of them took precedence. But in the day that came after, he’d rested enough to be more properly pleased with that tortured look that Sylvain wore when he came to his bed again. Perhaps it had been cruel to dig the points of his fingers into that handsome jawline of his, but it had been satisfying as well — each question that he asked him like taking a bite of something rich and delicious and poisoned.

There wasn’t a perfect word for how he’d felt in that moment. It was a unique situation. They were killers, after all, and it wasn’t as if that was the sort of profession from which one ever really retired; and part of him had wanted to make good on all of his training for the clumsy way in which Sylvain insisted on treating him. His apology had been lousy, after all, just like all of his apologies had been before.

But then he’d loved him, too, and just as intensely as he always had before. He’d loved the look of his eyes, earnest in the way his words hadn’t quite managed, and his stubborn brand of loyalty that didn’t follow by the standard rules. So he’d kissed him — because it felt good, and feeling good was infinitely better than feeling bad.

That is, it did under most circumstances, and those circumstances not including a lover’s heavily pregnant wife suddenly making an appearance while said lover was deep-throating him.

“Um,” Sylvain managed after Felix had told him just why it was that he’d stopped him short from breaking his miserable stint of celibacy. “Should I... I should go after her, shouldn’t I?”

Felix made an exasperated sound and crumpled back against his pile of pillows, his fingers caged over his face as he tried to puzzle out just how it was that Sylvain was both the brightest and most moronic man he’d ever met.

“Yes,” Sylvain guessed aloud.

“Not like _that_,” Felix warned him, waving at his bare chest and the impressively resilient tent of his trousers. 

“Shit.” Sylvain let lose a breathy, rueful laugh. Felix watched him as he drug his fingers through his messy hair, more charmed than he would admit by how hopeless he was. Sylvain’s eyes darted up at him, full of a boyish guilt and no small amount of trepidation. Felix flashed his palms at him as if to say, _what in the hell did you expect?_

“You need to be careful,” is what Felix said aloud. Not that he was so thrilled by the idea of Sylvain having found a wife, and less so by the fact that he’d made a mother out of her, and even less that he had _brought her with him_ to beg for his forgiveness but, then again, if anyone could commiserate with a discovery of the margrave’s infidelity it damn well was him. And although the whole notion of childbearing was a bit beyond his depth, he knew that a truth like this one certainly couldn’t be complementary to it — especially if, gods help her, this Sreng woman of his had been won over by him, too.

“Right. Yes. Fuck.” Sylvain was finally inspired to move. He hunted out his shirt left crumpled beside the bed and fiddled with its buttons, becoming visibly deterred as he realized that two of said buttons had been torn loose and were dangling against their stitching. “Shit.”

It was a peculiar situation. It was also, Felix decided drowsily, quite likely a disaster.

* * *

Portia had buttoned and unbuttoned her jacket three times. Each attempt had been sufficient to prepare her for the wintery chill outside. Still she lingered at the door. A fourth would perhaps be best. She squinted at the glitter of the greenhouse waiting for her at the end of the pathway sneaking ahead. A fourth or a fifth. She slipped the little almond-shaped buttons from their moorings and gave it another go.

Not that she didn’t want to tell her. Well, not that _want_ was the proper word. Just that if she were a woman like Ingrid, who had spoken so tenderly about her husband when they’d shared one of their four different cups of tea, she would have wanted to know about something like this. Whatever _this_ was. Right? Even if it was horrible — and oh, would she cry, that impressive Valkyrie, or would she wield her spade like a sword in revenge? — it was better to know than to be left unaware.

Her ears grew hot as she realized that she _was_ a woman like Ingrid.

“Oh dear,” she muttered, a useless little phrase she’d learned as a girl from one of her stodgy tutors. She slipped the final button of her jacket in place and, instead of whispering another _goodness_ or _my word_, sucked in a deep breath and strode out into the snow.

It was a pretty day. Cold, of course, but topped over with a clear blue sky and the bright sort of sunlight you could only find this far north. They called them _ptarmigan days_ in Sreng, when the snow stopped falling long enough for the men to hunt out those poor doomed birds as they sunned in the fields. Memories of cooking fires and cheery songs lingered at the back of her mind as Portia carefully made her way down the path. And what did Ingrid call days like these?

She quickly was in a position to ask her the question. Since she’d left her earlier for her doomed tea expedition, Ingrid had graduated from clipping rosebushes to take on a flowerless plant with dense, waxy leaves. Portia supposed in a different setting and with an actual shape it would have been called a topiary. Ingrid sensed her approach, the muscles of her back pulling taut with an old reflex before she turned to greet her with a smile.

“Why, hello again, Lady Portia!” She welcomed her brightly at her as she tucked her shears into her belt.

“Duchess,” Portia answered, sinking into her abridged version of a curtsy. Ingrid nodded, no doubt embarrassed that the margravina insisted on practicing all of her courtesy lessons on her even in spite of her assurances that they were entirely unnecessary.

“Have you met Felix, then?”

“Unfortunately, the Duke was asleep,” Portia lied. She wasn’t certain why she said it. It was as if her tongue had a mind of its own and meant to change the course that she was already barreling down. _Damn it_. The nape of her neck grew hot enough to draw a sweat.

“Oh, well, how annoying to have gone to all of that trouble for nothing,” Ingrid replied with a commiserating smile. She stepped closer to Portia, brushing her gloves over the face of her olive-drab jacket and glancing over the garden’s strange menagerie as she did. “I hope you at least drank the tea. Still, I know for a fact that Felix won’t stay in that bed for much longer, and even if he needs to. Perhaps we can all have dinner together tonight.”

“Perhaps,” Portia’s mouth echoed on her behalf. Ingrid cocked her head slightly to look her over.

“Are you alright? You look a little flush.”

“I’ve found that its always _something_ in this sort of state,” Portia replied with a jittering cheerfulness, gesturing at the swell beneath her long jacket. Ingrid offered her another fond smile. A distant voice inside her head celebrated at the idea that she might have at last advanced from _neighbor_ to _acquaintance_ to have been given a look like that.

“I see.” Ingrid stripped the gloves from her fingers and tucked them in her pocket. She looked up at the panes of the greenhouse next, shielding her eyes from the sun as she considered the blue sky outside. “Would you perhaps like to join me for a short walk? I know that when I’m in any sort of state myself, a little fresh air always helps.”

“That would be lovely,” Portia agreed, because it would, and because she knew that her feet wouldn’t let her follow any other path even if she’d wanted to.

“Good,” Ingrid smiled. “Let me just get a proper coat, then.”

The duo adventured into the flat promenade of the summertime gardens, now transformed into an eerie ice sculpture composed of spidery, leafless trees and barren spots where flowers were meant to bloom under a different kind of sun. The snow was perfect there, not yet disrupted by slipping footfalls or dirty hoof prints leading from the stables. Portia admired its glitter and allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of Ingrid’s arm as she steadied her step, their elbows linked together, and even if all of those words she needed to tell her were collecting ice themselves deep inside her.

“How have you found life in Fodlan?” Ingrid asked her eventually. “Has it been difficult for you?”

“Not really,” Portia admitted. “My father... well, my education was very important to him. I’ve always known about your country; honestly, perhaps better than my own. Maybe if I’d married a man born in the south it would have been different. But this place is not so different from Sreng.” Ingrid nodded.

“Still, I know the lords of Gautier aren’t exactly the most pleasant lot.” Portia smiled, ignoring her rankling nerves for a moment to picture all of those grey-haired men waiting (no doubt anxiously) for her husband’s return.

“No, but I’ve known men like them before. I find that they are like cats — they like to hiss and make a show at you, but as long as you give them the occasional petting they really aren’t that difficult to manage.” Ingrid laughed, looking a little surprised at Portia’s deft metaphor.

“That reminds me of my husband,” she conceded, cocking her brows into an amused shape. Portia’s stomach dropped a considerable distance in her gut.

“The Duke,” she mumbled, “he...why is it that you married him?” Ingrid glanced over at her, her face growing a little slack. Portia felt her cheeks flame. “I’m sorry. That was rude.” Ingrid shook her head.

“No,” she reassured her, her voice lilting into a laugh. “It’s alright. You aren’t the only one to think it. Felix is... he likes to make an enemy out of anything and everything. To show that he can conquer it, you know? So, of course, many people find him a bit... _intense_. But I’ve known him for long enough to know that that’s all just a game, a mask, something like that. Not that you’ve met him, but when you do, just remember this — underneath it all he’s actually quite sweet. And loyal.” Her lips thinned into a crooked line. “If perhaps to a fault.”

Portia’s chest seized at Ingrid’s unfortunate choice of words. The Duchess seemed to sense it. She looked to her again, her face falling as she spotted the tears gathering in Portia’s eyes. And damn it all, women from Sreng didn’t just _cry_. What was she doing?

“Oh, Portia. What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s...” She bit back a string of useless _oh dears_ and cringed as she felt another wave of tears pricking at her lash line. They were accompanied by a heavy curtain of guilt. Not that Portia felt entirely responsible for her husband — she hardly felt that she even _knew_ him even with his child kicking inside her. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow it was still her fault, and her the master of some reckless hound that had found its way into Ingrid’s chicken coop. “It’s just that... that it isn’t fair, for this... with you... and...”

“Portia.” Ingrid stopped and skirted in front of her, gripping her arms tight. Her eyes settled on her, green and bewitching. Portia felt her lips tremble. “What’s happened?”

“I...” She started, hoping that the Duchess couldn’t hear that wild thrashing of her heart as well as she could. “Sylvain—”

“Sylvain,” Ingrid interrupted icily, those gemstone eyes of hers narrowing into slits. Portia bit back her next words with surprise as Ingrid’s shoulders leveled into a tight shape. The older woman sucked in a deep breath and released it as a sigh. “Here,” she said next, looking over Portia’s shoulder at a line of neat benches arranged alongside the spot where a path no doubt lay under the snow. “Come sit here with me.”

Portia obliged her request, suddenly feeling like a naughty little girl being led to receive her punishment. Ingrid swept the shelf of snow from the bench before they both sat together, their elbows brushing as the duchess tilted herself at an angle so that her all-seeing gaze was still fast upon her. 

“Before you say anything about that,” Ingrid told her, “I’d like to ask you a question.” Portia nodded. It didn’t seem as though she had a choice. “What is it that you’d like to do?”

“...what?”

“If tomorrow Gautier was to disappear, and all of this along with it,” Ingrid answered, nodding her head at the neat line of hibernating trees, “and you found yourself free to your whims, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Portia answered truthfully. Her whims had always had a footnote before. She’d had free range of her father’s house, for instance, but it had hardly been as big as the duchess’ greenhouse. The Gautier holdfast was certainly larger than both, but she’d not yet mustered the courage to explore even its furthest parts.

Well, _courage_ wasn’t the right word; she wasn’t truly afraid of most anything. Unsettled, maybe. That was it. It was unsettling to not know much of anything at all, and no matter how clever everyone always insisted that she was.

“Travel, I suppose,” she admitted finally. “I’d like to see new things. Speak with people I’ve never met before.” Ingrid offered her another one of her reassuring smiles.

“And when you think of the places you would go, is your husband at your side?” Portia frowned, another spike of something difficult to define shivering along her spine.

“I don’t know.” She glanced glumly at her lap. “He’s... The Margrave has been very kind to me. I might be naive, Duchess, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how marriages like ours can be. He’s never raised his voice at me, let alone his hand, and gives me whatever I ask for without a second thought. Any girl from Sreng would be lucky to have what I have now.” Ingrid urged her on with a slow nod. “But I... When you speak about the Duke I see something in you that I don’t really recognize. I think that... Is it horrible of me, do you think,” she stammered, her fingers splayed and kneading against her belly, “that I don’t love him?”

She flinched as Ingrid covered one of her hands with her own. Her palm was calloused, just like Sylvain’s.

“Of all the men in Fodlan, Portia, I think Sylvain is the most difficult to love.” Ingrid’s paired the sentiment with a quiet, breathy laugh. “To be honest with you, he’s a bit of a bastard.” She squeezed her fingers as Portia glanced over at her, surprised. “Still, I am one of those few people who _does_ love him, and in just the way that I love the Duke. I don’t really have much of an option. I’ve known them both since I was a little girl, you know? For all of my life, I’ve been watching them dig the same hole together to then take turns in falling in. And each time as I go to pull them out of it again they look to me as if they’re surprised to find themselves at the bottom.” She shook her head. “But I’m just as terrible as they are, always helping them back up so that they can go diving again.”

Ingrid paused to study her for a moment, her lips turning into a somber shape that looked a little sad. Portia wasn’t sure just how to read her, or just how it was that she was supposed to feel herself. _Crushed_ was the best word for it, really: weighed down by the cold and by the stone-press of her swollen stomach, and by those emerald eyes that seemed to read the things that Portia hadn’t yet uncovered herself. 

“In any case,” Ingrid continued wistfully. “Love is a funny thing. None of us can understand it, let alone control it. I’ve been in love with a ghost for over ten years — soon it will be for longer than when I knew him as a flesh and bone man. But its still there, as sweet as ever, as if I can still hear his voice in my ear. That same mean sort of love has trapped Felix and Sylvain together since they were just boys. Even if they wanted to fight it, I don’t think they’d win.”

“You knew?” Those two words seemed a poor summary of what she’d seen, but Portia wasn’t so certain how else to say it. Ingrid winced slightly at her question.

“Yes,” Ingrid answered, her eyes darting to their fingers intertwined. “My poor sweet girl. I knew.”

_Ptarmigan days_, Portia thought again as a strange sense of dread settled inside her. And how sad for them: those pretty, foolish birds. 


	15. The Terms of Our Surrender

The bed creaked as Felix stood to his feet. He did so slowly, pressing the bare pads of his toes and heels against the floor in inching increments like a cat unfurling from a stretch. His body followed after obediently. It was stiff and aching from its sequestration and riled from Sylvain’s abbreviated affection. He groaned and bowed his arms over his head. A familiar orchestration followed — his body cocking side to side at the waist before folding forward, fingers skimming at his toes and then dipping further against the floorboards. His stretching did not leave him exactly limber, but it did leave him warmed. 

Good enough for dressing, he supposed.

He eyed the window before approaching his wardrobe. It was a sunny day but no doubt cold. Part of him wanted to run bare-skinned into the snow; to sate all of the stirred and crackling emotions in his chest with that clean, crisp chill.

He selected a pair of dark trousers and a dark sweater to match. 

There was a mirror propped against the wall beside the wardrobe. It was an ancient thing, and tarnished at the edges with what looked like the spores of some alien fungi. He’d dressed in front of it since he’d been a little boy; flexed his arms when they were still just skinny little shapeless things and imagined himself as a man with muscles like Glenn. Later he’d sat in front of it when the room was quiet and dark and had tried to find his brother in his face instead of his arms.

He did not look like Glenn, now, and he did not look like that little boy. Slipping his bedclothes to his ankles, he rubbed an absentminded hand over the rough ridges of his body. There were the six arrow-points that had once dotted his shoulders, now turned to asterisks footnoting that their shooter had been less lucky than him.A slashing stroke bisected his chest from collarbone to navel, a shallow book-end to the far more gnarled scar tracing his spine. The former from a sword, if he remembered correctly, and the latter from that imperial lance dragging at him from some foggy morning long ignored.

His skin was covered in the spiderwebs of spells as well, a mottled purple lacework that was harsh against his pallor. Of all of them, too countless to properly catalogue, these scars bothered him the most. Not that he was the sort of man to admire his own body, but it was unlucky that white magic could not undo such traces of its darker cousins. Looking at himself now, he was reminded of his childhood books about monstrous men pieced together from cadavers and shocked to life again. Not that it wasn’t fitting, really. That was very nearly what had happened to them as well.

His fingers lingered on a new shape added to the mix: a circle blushed a crushed rose color near the hook of his hipbone. Felix remembered the heat of Sylvain’s mouth and how it had teased the skin there, sucking until he’d drawn a bruise. Of the short list of lovers that Felix had entertained, that had always been the man’s hallmark — leaving behind proof that he had been there. A low hunger broiled in Felix’s stomach as he finally turned to dress.

The castle was quiet in that sort of way that followed after breakfast and came before its many inhabitants began to long for lunch. He traced over the familiar corridors without being so certain of where it was that he was headed. Part of him was drawn to wherever it was that Sylvain had gone, of course, but that wouldn’t work, not now that he had chased after his wife. His _wife_, Felix’s mind tested again cruelly. He forced it quiet.

“Ah!” His step was stilled by a sudden youthful cry. He turned quick at his heels but the boy was quicker, his arms already thrown around his legs and his face buried into his side. Felix’s body stiffened at such an intimate touch, but he forced his hand into a comforting shape and rubbed it gently against the boy’s shoulders.

“Castor,” he greeted him warmly. The boy sniffed in reply, his arms tightening around his waist.

He’d heard the boy lurking at his door many times since he had woken from his cursed slumber. As fond as he was of him, he hadn’t been hurt to not find him at his bedside. Castor had enough ghosts already — men and boys and women and girls all sleeping and not waking, no matter what he did, their bodies cold and growing gaunt around the eyes. Felix understood. After all, he’d not yet managed the trip to the Fraldarius cemetery to see the headstone that had replaced his father, and how many years had it been since he’d traced Glenn’s name carved into granite there?

“Come,” he continued, nudging at the boy’s shoulders. “Show me how everything has fared since I last returned.”

Castor nodded, rubbing at his eyes with his sleeve as he slotted his hot hand into Felix’s larger one. He tugged him forward into a tour of the castle’s meandering footprint, pointing out the little inconsequential things that had changed since he’d set off for Almyra so many weeks before: a rug finally replaced after lying for so long threadbare; a fresh arrangement of stunted blossoms from Ingrid’s strange garden; a new girl from the village dressed in the castle’s understated uniform and blushing as she introduced herself, interrupted from her task of dusting a suit-of-arms.

If he’d been his father, perhaps Felix would’ve gently scolded Castor for his behavior. Told him that it wasn’t proper for him to sniffle and rub at his eyes that way, and certainly unheard of for a squire to grip at his master’s hand. No doubt there were other lords in that very castle who would have insisted the same; and those same men who had quietly whispered when Felix had first taken him under his wing, them still hopeful that he would produce a proper heir himself, and cynical as well about the idea of him harboring a boy as timid and sweet-faced as the late Earl’s son. No matter how well they’d tempered the gossip about him, after all, Felix knew his reputation was not filled with affection alone.

But he didn’t reprimand him. Fodlan didn’t need another man like him, or Sylvain, or Dimitri — little frightened boys turned grim and brittle and scarred.

Castor led him finally into his study, his eyes downturned and bashful as Felix admired the neat arrangement of all of his books and letters and ledgers. There was a cheery fire crackling in the hearth. The room smelled like its toasted kindling, underpinned with the earthy sweetness leeching from the ancient leather of the study’s furniture. He sat into one of those soft-skinned chairs and watched as Castor trailed along one of the bookshelves to worry over some book apparently misplaced. Chin balanced in his palm, Felix smiled — fleetingly and measured, but a smile all the same.

And he didn’t feel hopeful, of course, because that sort of feeling had been pruned from him long before. But there was something there, something warm and tender that soothed the edges of that constant ache of his. He couldn’t help but wonder if his father had once sat in that same chair and felt the same as he watched his dark-haired sons combing over those endless shelves — the elder nearly as quiet as Castor was, although his eyes were always stormy from his foul moods as if he’d already realized that his life was to be cut too short. And the other, younger and dreamy and always giggling from some secret punch-line. 

Fraldarius’ ghosts. For once the thought didn’t make him sad. At least they’d all come home.

* * *

Sylvain trudged out into the snow to seek out his wife. Ingrid found him first. For the first time in his life he sympathized with the men he’d once fought. Surely it must have been frightening to watch her sweep upon them as she did to him, and her armed with that sharp lance of hers instead of the bare fists she brandished now. 

Not that he doubted that she could still manage the job unarmed.

“Ingrid,” he managed before she’d boxed him up against some snowcapped statue of a prancing faun. She took the time to strip the glove from her right hand before she swung it with a cracking smack against his cheek.

“There’s a reason we geld horses, you know,” she muttered sourly. He laughed, caught off guard by her bitter humor, which only deepened her scowl. He crumpled his brows apologetically as he touched at the red spot forming across his cheekbone. “Just because you’re selfish doesn’t mean you should be cruel.”

“I wasn’t cruel, Ingrid. It was an honest mistake.” She stepped back a pace and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I suggest you omit both of those words from your vocabulary, and quickly.” He nodded. _Fair enough_. She eyed him sharply. “She knows.”

His breath grew shallow in his throat. He wasn’t quite certain why. Portia was a clever woman — not that what she’d seen would have left much open to interpretation.

Still. He’d hardly planned to reveal everything to her like that, and less to have Ingrid confirm it in whatever way she had — and no doubt leaving him in no position for compromise. Ingrid’s glare softened slightly as she watched him come to this revelation.

“Why didn’t you just tell her?” He sighed at her question.

“Her own _father_ suggested I keep a paramour or two,” he admitted, “but I don’t think he was expecting something like this. It’s not like Felix’s some fucking mistress. And so what happens if she runs back to him and says I haven’t kept up my end of our bargain?” Ingrid’s glare returned and doubled over into a simmering fury.

“_Bargain_,” she snapped, glancing sharply over her shoulder before whipping back to face him again. “Do you think that’s how she sees it? And what’s her reward then, hm?”

“Well, not a war, for one.”

“Don’t talk to me like you think I’m stupid.” _Fuck_. This was not going well. He rubbed his eyes.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he promised her as earnestly as he could manage. “Or her, for that matter. But what would you have had me say? _Darling, won’t you come say hello to the man I_—”

“My _husband_,” Ingrid reminded him brusquely. Something in his chest twitched. Well, yes, that was the mess of it, wasn’t it?

_Shit_.

He kept on rubbing at his eyes. 

“I know. I _know_,” he barked. Ingrid huffed a sharp breath through her nose.

“You owe her an explanation.”

“I know,” he echoed miserably.

“She’s in the gardens.” He glanced over her shoulder at the hulking shapes of all of those hibernating shrubs and trees. “I hope you have something better prepared for her.” He brushed his hands together, eyes settling on the silver cloud of his breath.

“It’s freezing out here,” he contended. Ingrid smirked.

“I don’t think the cold bothers her,” she replied with a shrug. He felt himself being sucked into the very core of the earth itself as she shouldered past him and towards the castle’s grey walls.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself as he shoved his hands into his pockets and ventured further into the yard.

He found Portia where Ingrid had left her. It wasn’t hard. Her hair was like a bonfire against the snow. She wasn’t hunched over from the chill. On the contrary she looked quite natural surrounded by all of that glittering white, as if she were some strange winter’s nymph who’d snuck into the doldrums of their mortal world.

The idea didn’t embolden him. Neither did her look as she turned to watch his approach.

“Hello,” he offered lamely. She dipped her chin in greeting. The path was slick with ice. He minced over it carefully, feeling about as miserable as he ever had before as he tried to find the proper spots to circle towards her bench. He finally managed it and sat beside her. She was a little creature compared to his height. Of course most of them were, but it had never seemed so awkward before.

“I’m sorry,” he spat out before he lost the nerve, “that I lied to you.” Her eyes snuck in his direction before fixing on the kid leather of her gloves. “It wasn’t my intention to hide anything from you.”

“Why not?” Her voice was quiet and sweet, the way it always was. Still, her simple question made him pause. His own words felt too-large and clumsy in his mouth.

“Well, because I,” he stammered, his brow furrowing with frustration from the fact that it was so difficult to find that silver tongue he’d once boasted about before.

“Listen.” He ripped his hands from his pockets and began to fiddle his one of his sleeves. “My mother died when I was young. To be honest with you, I think she was relieved when the end came for her. My father, too. I know that you know about my father. He was a bastard. I suppose if I’ve ever hated anyone, I hated him. The only reason he brought me into this world — forced me on my mother who should have never had a child, gods save her, let alone two — was because he was so terrified of dying alone on that fucking border-line.” He winced his tone grew too sour. “Sorry,” he amended quickly.

“The truth is,” he continued more gently, “that I’d never been so much like my father as when I accepted our betrothal. I was a coward.”

“You didn’t want to go to war again,” she offered quietly. He winced at her benevolent suggestion and shook his head.

“No, I didn’t want to go to war. But I didn’t want to marry you, either. And not because of who you are.” He forced himself to look her in the eye. She didn’t break his gaze, although her expression was difficult to read. “In spite of it, honestly. It’s just that your father’s daughter could have been a bitter old witch, or she could have been you — it doesn’t really matter. Nothing would have changed. I’m not a normal person.”

“It’s not that strange,” she interjected again. “There are plenty of men like that in Sreng.” His lips flinched into a sad little smile.

“Not that, Portia.” He looked down to watch the skin of his palms stretch as he flattened them against his thighs. “I’m cursed. Just like my father. Most men in my family are. We’re just animals with our backs to the wall, and so we lash out at everything — don’t know any better, you know?”

She shook her head in confusion. It didn’t matter.

“In spite of all of that, I don’t want to be like him. He’s dead, you know? I should be able to manage it — not all of the time, maybe, but at least with the things that matter.” He sighed. “What I’m trying to say is that I should have told you from the start.”

“It’s not just that you didn’t tell me,” she retorted in a pinched tone. “But that I was the only one who didn’t know. You made me into a fool.” He nodded slowly.

“It wasn’t right,” he agreed.

“No, it wasn’t.” His eyes darted in her direction.

“I don’t want to be like my father,” he insisted more sternly. “I can’t change what I’ve already done, but I can make a promise of how things will be from now on. If you would prefer to go north again then I will not stop you. But if you want to stay in Fodlan I will stand by you, and shelter you and our child.”

“So you will continue on doing exactly what you’ve done before,” she countered with the hint of a dry smile. His chest tightened.

Well, so perhaps it wasn’t so much of a concession at all.

“Or,” he offered more clumsily, “I can offer... well, whatever you like. We have apartments in the capital if you’d prefer. Honestly, it’s more comfortable there. Or further south, even, I’m sure we could manage something.” He jumped as she suddenly reached out to grip his arm.

“This is what I want,” she replied, her eyes sharp in the sunlight. “When our child is born they will call you _Father_, and you will be gentle with them in a way that our fathers never were. If our child is a son you will grant him your titles as your heir, and teach him so that no one can ever call him ignorant — some savage’s son.” Sylvain flinched at the idea but she continued on. “And if our child is a daughter you will do the same, and you will never barter her hand like my father has done mine.”

“Yes,” he answered with a nod. “Of course.” Her lips tightened into a serious shape he’d never seen her wear before.

“When they are of a proper age, I would like to take our child to see as much of this land as we can muster. I don’t want them to be like me.”

“Portia,” he contended. She shook her head.

“And if I ever have a second son or daughter,” she added, her voice wavering just slightly at the insinuation, “then I would like you to treat them kindly, so that there is no spite sown between them and our child.”

“Of course.”

“Alright,” she answered. His brows rose slightly as she stripped the glove from her hand and offered it in his direction. “Those are my terms.” _For her secrecy_, he wondered, were those her missing words? For her discretion, or for his betrayal? He gritted his jaw but nodded and gripped her fingers with his own.

“Then I suppose we are in agreement,” he told her. She smiled. He realized that they were not so different really; red-headed and born in the north, and so very much like their sires.

* * *

Felix did not see Sylvain again until long after the sun had set. It was difficult to track the passing of the day. He buried himself in the work left for him at his desk, falling into the easy rhythm of signing the things he agreed with and annotating the ones with which he didn’t, and the latter with a tense shorthand that had already gained him some notoriety in Fhirdiad.

The sun had been bright that day but so was the moon, full and reflected against the snow so that it still streamed through his windows strong enough to cast a shadow. The only hint that night had come had been Castor’s reluctant retreat to his bed. Felix had been required to insist thrice over that with the morning he would wake again, and even then the boy had drug his feet as his patient governess had led him away. 

Sylvain took his place when one of the hallway clocks gonged with the midnight hour. He looked just as stubborn and boyish as Castor had, sinking into one of the chaises lining the bookshelves with an exhausted sigh. Felix ignored him at first, partly because he was busy, and partly because he knew it would annoy him, and because he deserved to be a little annoyed.

But then Sylvain had sighed again, and again once more until it was nearly as predictable as the scratching of his pen. Finally Felix glanced over in his direction and felt his chest squeeze at the sight of him looking so thoroughly downtrodden. He sucked in a deep breath of his own before setting his pen against the desktop and closing his set of ledgers with a conclusive thud.

“You’ve spoken with Portia, then?”

“Yes,” Sylvain murmured. “And Ingrid. Is there anyone else you’d like me to grovel before?”

“Perhaps.” Sylvain snorted a breath through his nose. Felix leaned back into his chair, not yet convinced to rise.

“And so what did she say?” He paused, did not receive an answer. “Portia, not Ingrid.”

“She is being completely and frustratingly accommodating.”

“She does seem like the type.”

“I feel like a monster.” Sylvain scrubbed his palms over his face. Felix fought the urge to roll his eyes and finally stood to step towards his sulking repose. He looked over him for a moment, his hands at his hips as his eyes drew across his long body.

“You are a monster.”

Sylvain’s hands dropped to his chest. There was an honest and wounded look in his eyes. Felix had seen it before, but not often: when Glenn had died, when they’d cut Miklan down, when they’d stood together on that windy cliff and had seen Dimitri’s ghost in the ruins of Garreg Mach. When he’d woken at his bedside, his hair too long and mussed. And now, and how many more to come?

Felix heard him sigh once more as he stepped backwards towards the door. He shut it and took care in turning the lock. Something new had replaced Sylvain’s beleaguered look when he turned to make his return. His caramel eyes chased him as he crawled atop him on the chaise.

_You are a monster_, he thought again, not bothering to speak the words aloud. _And so am I_.

Felix worked the buttons of his shirt loose. Sylvain remained as mute as he did, his eyes still locked on him as his own hands trailed to Felix’s bracketed thighs. Felix ran his fingers over his broad chest in turn. It was cold, as if he’d just stormed in from the winter night outside.

Sylvain made a quiet, disappointed sound as he whisked his hands away. That made Felix smirk. _Greedy_. He crossed his arms over his front to pull his sweater over his head. Sylvain’s pouting voice grew hungry as he turned his attention to the button of his slacks. He stripped them away as well until he was bare in his straddle above him, relishing that fogged-over lustfulness that had flushed the older man’s gaze.

Felix leaned forward to mimic the attention Sylvain had given him that morning. Whereas the margrave’s mouth had been full of kisses, however, Felix’s was full of teeth. Sylvain moaned as he ground himself between his legs in tandem with the tightening of his jaw. With each breath he sunk his teeth deeper into the soft skin of his chest and the tensed muscle beneath. He felt one of Sylvain’s hands skirt between them to fist around his cock — considered knocking it away before his skilled touch convinced him otherwise.

Another bite, just like another one of those questions Felix had spat at him the morning before. His mouth was full of the words he’d meant to say instead.

_Why did you lie to me?_

Sylvain’s fingers, slick from touching him, slipped around his crouch to press gingerly inside him. Felix groaned into the divots of the muscles striping his side.

_Why did you fuck her?_

Felix arms bowed at the elbows so that he could finally unlace his trousers. Sylvain gasped with appreciation, jutting his hips forward to drag himself against his folded pose.

_Why is it that you always break everything you touch?_

The taste of blood filled his mouth as his incisors ground against the angle of Sylvain’s hipbone. Sylvain hissed and curled his fingers inside him so that they brushed against that spot that made Felix sputter and see stars.

_Why am I never enough?_

Felix leaned further against his thighs. Sylvain drew back his hands and watched him through his lashes as he leaned forward to take him in his mouth. Maybe he winced — thought that his cock would be the next victim to his teeth. The idea made something cruel and molten settle in Felix’s gut. He heard Sylvain mutter some gasping bastardization of his name when he bobbed his head instead.

“Please,” Sylvain breathed, predicting Felix’s next move. Felix straightened and looked at him — at his body, not yet softened by peace; at the blossoming bruises he’d left behind; at that drop of blood dripping from his hipbone towards the patch of hair below it and very nearly the same color; and at that place where he supposed his heart must have been.

_Just how long will it take for you to die?_

Felix rose onto his knees to ease Sylvain inside him. One of them moaned — he lost track of which. It didn’t matter. They were both the same. Together even when they were apart.

“Felix. Fuck, Felix.” Sylvain’s hands grabbed at his waist, dwarfing the ring of his body with their broad draw. Felix leaned into them, his head dropping back against his shoulders as a low, pulsing pleasure began to unfurl the rest of his thoughts into a single string of _why, why, why_.

“I love you,” Sylvain slurred. “Gods. I love you so much.”

_Promise me_, Felix had told him on that frosty hill so many years before, and them both wearing little black jackets that left them looking pale against the grey sky; _no matter what, no matter what happens, we’ll die together, alright?_

Felix moved to thread his fingers through his own. Sylvain gripped back tightly. His hands were cold, but he liked to think that he could feel them warming under his touch.

“I love you,” Felix finally replied. The chaise creaked as Sylvain’s back arched against the velvet already crushed by their writhing limbs.

_No matter what_, Sylvain had once promised him as he’d linked their little fingers together in a boyhood oath.

“No matter what.”


	16. Three Promises

Castor’s father died when he was four and a half years old. He didn’t see it happen, just the aftermath: his body crumpled in the laundry, a place he’d never seen him step foot before. It took him two days to find him stiff and bloated in that place. He’d been dressed in a ratty shirt and trousers borrowed from the gardener’s shed. _We’ll go on an adventure_, Castor’s mother had told him when she’d dressed him the same. He’d found her body in the gardens and her head in the road on that first day when those strange men had arrived at their door. 

His father died when he was four and a half years old. Castor buried him when he was nineteen.

After the service, their mourning party lingered at his grave and at the one beside it like lost children waiting for the chime of some bell to draw them away. Dragonflies had flown lazily above their heads; summer, that meant, at least up there in the north. There were no dragonflies where Castor had been born. That part didn’t matter. He’d had a different name, then. Maybe it hadn’t even been him. When he thought of _f__ather_ now, after all, he saw dark hair spiked silver at the temples and gentle hands covered in scars, and he had forgotten just how that man with his same blue eyes had once looked when he’d smiled and called him _son_. 

His mother had cried as they finished smoothing over his father’s grave. She didn’t do that so often. He’d pushed his way through the crowd (their eyes downcast, peeking at him, quiet _I’m-so-sorrys_ slipping through their lips) to grip her hands in his own. That had made her smile. She’d rolled up to the tips of her toes to plant a kiss against his brow. A part of him had told him to be embarrassed: that he was a man now, and that he wasn’t supposed to cry and cling to his mother like a child.

_The bravest boy I’ve ever known used to cry all of the time_, Uncle Sylvain had once told him.

His eyes had darted sideways to hunt out that tell-tale spark of red hair. For once, the boy’s height — already so tall even though he was his junior by nearly seven years— was a godsend. Anton was at his mother’s side. They looked like two cardinals perched on a branch, and with her shielding him under her wing even if it left them crooked and mismatched. They’d arrived from Brigid too late but in time for the burial, skin still dark and sun-kissed.

He and Anton were different in a hundred different ways, the least important of which was their age. Castor had been a big brother to him since Anton had come roaring into the world inside that same castle now casting a shadow over them both, and him yowling like a cat heralding his own birth. Whereas Castor was quiet and careful, Anton was a battering ram charging through each and every day of his chaotic thirteen years. His mother the Margravina only encouraged the behavior, pairing him with an entourage of tutors and trainers who had added dangerous things like _clever_ and _strong_ to his mischievous schemes.

Anton loved sweets and swimming and making girls too old for him blush: Castor often craved vinegar and was always riding with dreams of things with wings, and had found his heart already fully commandeered by the King of Almyra’s pink-haired daughter when he was just fourteen. Anton called him names like _gramps_ and _old lady_ for how he always insisted that everything be even-keeled: Castor simply sighed and called him _brat_ when he booby-trapped his study and spread dirty rumors about him that made him blanch.

Anton and Castor had both had two fathers. Castor’s had been an earl and a duke. Anton’s had been a duke and a margrave. Their mothers, too, had more than one husband to their command. There was the kind, quiet sentinel from the capital with his dark skin and silvery hair who had, in recent years, become more of a fixture in the Duchess’ glass gardens than in Fhirdiad at his liege’s side; and then those men, some handsome, some erudite, a few the rare mix of the two whom the Margravina hunted out like scenic viewpoints along the long line of her wanderlust.

For everything that made them different, here was what made them the same: their fathers were all dead. 

* * *

“I don’t understand it.”

“Don’t drink that,” Castor said, eyeing that pilfered bottle again. Anton stuck out his tongue at him and took a pointedly long swig.

“Everyone drinks in Brigid.”

“We’re not in Brigid.”

Anton glanced around the dark study — filled with furs and thick tapestries that belied the castle’s perpetual chill — and nodded as if to say _well, yeah, of course_. Castor followed his gaze and felt his chest prick from the sight of all of those familiar things his father had once touched: the atlases, well-worn by the Duke’s pointing finger; the books Castor had all but memorized; his desk, heavy and foreboding like that shield that he’d inherited three days before.

“I don’t understand it,” Anton repeated stubbornly. “How could they just die?”

“I don’t know, Anton.” It wasn’t something he said often, not even to him in his endless quest to prove him wrong with trivia and riddles and dry jokes.

“It isn’t fair.” 

“It’s alright to be upset.” The young man scowled at him.

“Of course I’m upset. He was my _father_.”

It would have been a simple statement coming from anyone else. With them, however, it was complicated. The Duke hadn’t been Castor’s true father, of course, but that had hardly mattered. He’d been his constant companion since those soldiers had brought him to the duchy as a filthy, frightened little boy. Now he dressed like him and spoke like him, thought like him, wore his hair long like he had even if it didn’t entirely suit him, and soon he would be called by his title (the thought of which made a jolt of lightning spark down his spine), just like he’d been trained.

One only had to look at Anton to know that the opposite was true for him. He had the Margrave’s hair and burnt caramel eyes and his nose for good measure, and Castor’s mother had often told him that he was a mimic of the man when he’d been his age himself. It was a peculiar thing to have happened, given that Anton had so rarely been at his side. He and the Margravina had been swept up in their world tour since his eighth birthday, starting in the far reaches of that country he’d one day rule and soaring east, west, south thereafter without showing any signs of stopping until that grim letter had sought them out.

If Castor hadn’t known Anton as well as he did he might have interpreted his words as a challenge. Instead he snatched the bottle from him, took a draw of his own, set it at his feet before cocking his arm around Castor’s shoulders and drawing him into a sideways hug.

“Quiddit,” Anton muttered unconvincingly. “...Kemley told me,” he added after a long-drawn pause, “that my grandfather died the same way.”

“Kemley?”

“My tutor. The one from Fhirdiad.” Castor pictured the heavyset man in his mind’s eye. Anton shifted to look up into his face. “But you knew that already.” He felt him bristle beneath his arm. “You always have a theory, Cassie. Tell me what it is.”

“This time I don’t.” Anton frowned.

“...Do you think I’ll die like that, too?” His voice hollowed out with the question. For once he sounded very nearly his own age. Anton shook him lightly and squeezed his fingers around the round of his shoulder.

“Of course not.”

“How can you know something like that?”

_Because you don’t have a crest_, he wanted to tell him, his tone bordering on bitter; but the Duchess had already schooled him not to tell him such a thing. _It’s a sensitive topic_, she’d insisted him, her green eyes full of all of the implications she didn’t quite need to say aloud. _Don’t meddle_.

Not that he knew much more about the subject than that. His own crest was so inconsequential that it hadn’t even been given a proper name. Minister Hevring had told him that it was a lucky one, but he knew he was just being kind. In any case it was nothing like the Duke’s crest, pulled from legends and burning bright inside him like a beacon light, and even less like the one that the Margrave had once borne like a curse in so many different ways.

Still, Castor didn’t need to be a crest scholar to understand what had happened. Maybe that meant that he could have told Anton the truth. Should have, even, maybe. He considered it with a tip of his chin; the way he’d form the words to say that he’d watched the Duke and the Margrave throw one fur over their shoulders and then another with each passing season, no matter that they were both men born and weathered in the snowy north. How he’d been an audience of one to watch the way that their hair had started to turn grey too young, and how his father’s voice had flattened when he’d explain that that sort of thing happened to plenty of people who’d been caught up in a war.

Maybe it wasn’t even a secret, or at least not one to Anton. After all, the boy must have known that the letters his parents shared, while frequent and fondly addressed, had never been sweetened with affection. He’d at least come to understand that the Margravina’s suitors were not hidden paramours but guests warmly greeted when they made their rare visits north.

And surely he’d heard the gossip about their fathers, even if those tawdry stories had become watered down with time. But no matter how tall he grew with each turn of the moon Anton was still mostly a boy, and Castor hardly more, and no amount of studying had prepared him to address something like that with him there alone in that haunted room.

After all, Castor had never had the courage to challenge it outright himself. The closest he had come had been on a chilly night after his sixteenth birthday when he’d found his father there at his desk looking like a ghost.

_Why are you doing this_, he’d croaked. _Why can’t you just stop?_

“You’ll just have to trust me,” is what Castor told Anton. The young man huffed and glanced away.

“Cassie,” he asked him some time later, that stupid nickname gnawing at him more gently than it usually did. “Do you... do you think that he was afraid?”

_One day_, Castor’s father had told him after he’d calmed his nerves that night three years before with an apology that had been both unsatisfying and heartfelt, _you’ll find that one thing worth dying for. I can’t tell you exactly when it will happen or what it’ll be. It won’t be like mine, but that’s alright, they’re all different. That’s the beauty in it._

_I don’t understand_, he’d spat back defensively, his mind filling with those old memories of his long-lost siblings strewn in the dirt. So what had they died for, then? What was beautiful about that?

His father had reached forward to grip his shoulders. His hands were strong — he’d known they were, had heard the stories of what he’d done — but with him they’d always been gentle. They’d never swung at him when he misbehaved, but had instead guided his arms into the proper form in the training yard, and had nudged his fingers as he helped him trace the shapes of stars from the heights of the balustrades, and had soothed his brow when his dreams became too-dark and suffocating. In each memory his hands had been warm, but in that moment they’d been ice cold. 

_My brother,_ his father had told him next, _found his reason when he was twenty-one years old. It wasn’t kind, but it was his, and he reached for it even if it was selfish and left us all behind. I hated him for a long time because of what he did, but I understand it now. It’s alright if you hate me for a while, too._

“No,” Castor answered as his eyes leveled on the chair left empty behind the desk.“I don’t think so.” Anton nodded and cleared his throat to hide a sniffling sound.

“You’re right.” Anton had forced his voice into a bold tone. “He was a war hero, you know.”

“I know.”

Of course he did. He knew that war just as well as he’d known its storied players. But to Anton it was just another red-lettered header in his history books. If he was lucky the younger man would never feel its teeth, and never in the way that they had chewed Castor up and spat him out as a child.

After all, Fodlan was at peace — and not the kind of peace that was paraded and boasted about, not now that it was so common, but the kind that was embedded in the fact that when he turned eighteen that very same red-headed boy would inherit a kingdom that may have otherwise sparked new fires along the borderlands.

And then there was Almyra, a once-hungry dragon now sated by the friendship between their kings and the betrothals that had followed after: King Dimitri’s sweet first-born daughter, so much like her mother in her looks, promised in her cradle to the eastern kingdom’s bold crown prince whom Castor knew far better because of his own shockingly successful courtship of the Almyran’s twin sister Siobhan.

Then there was Duscur, quiet and healing, of which he’d learned so much about from his mother’s gardening companion; Brigid, flourishing under its queen, as Anton had no doubt experienced first-hand; Dagda, Albina, Morfis all withdrawn into their own affairs. The world had sucked in a deep breath when Fodlan had reached to tear itself apart, but now it had exhaled.

And so maybe that was what his father had meant as well when he’d told him that he wasn’t afraid to die.

“You aren’t allowed to die,” Anton grumbled, his voice bouncing against the curves of that bottle he’d stolen again.

“What?” Castor laughed and snatched the bottle back. “That’s not an order I can keep.”

“Well, not until you’re properly old, alright?” Anton glanced over at him timidly. “Fat and full of wrinkles, no teeth, that sort of thing.”

“Thanks for the generous prediction, kid.”

“I’m not a kid!” Anton tugged at the base of the bottle and scowled as Castor held it tight. “Promise, alright?”

Castor smiled crookedly and shook his head.

“Alright. Promise, but only if you promise, too.”

Anton shifted from beneath his arm. Castor laughed again as the young man jutted his little finger in his direction. He shaped his own into the proper crook shape and hooked their fingers together to seal the pledge they’d made.

* * *

The north had bumpy roads. 

There was no reason for it. Fodlan’s corps of engineers had been combing the continent for years in order to smooth out the ruts and pits of its various thoroughfares. This revitalization project had been a clever initiative. It had employed countless men and women who found themselves homeless or country-less or limbless after the war, distracting them in a time when they might have otherwise looked too closely at the cost of their victory.

Moreover, those smoothed streets and country roads had been like a match against the kindling of the fledging country’s economy. Traders from old Leicester who had once dreamed of selling spices and silk to sour-faced hagglers in Nuvelle and Oche and the Fangs now did so without a second thought and to a tidy profit, not to mention to the benefit of their once-tasteless cuisine. 

Of course, Linhardt knew that it had been a clever idea, because it had been _his_, although he’d hardly been involved in the uninspired task of implementing it. That had gone to someone else — quite honestly, he hadn’t known whom — and whoever it had been had clearly overlooked that little winding path leading southward from Fraldarius, the damned bloody fool.

Linhardt sighed and rubbed his temples as their coach lurched over a particularly deep hole.

“Are you okay?” His eyes flickered over to Caspar in his spot sprawled across the opposite bench. Caspar had been busy rubbing an oiled cloth over the grip of his axe since they’d left the duchy that morning, and had been unmoved by Linhardt’s complaints that the smell of wax and grease had given him a headache. How quaint of him to ask after his health now. Linhardt shaped his face into a haughty look that they both knew wasn’t terribly sincere.

“We must get you your own coach from now on,” he lied. Caspar nudged one of his feet with the toe of his boot.

“Sure, Lin.”

Linhardt sighed and shuffled through the pile of treatises and pamphlets and letters he was ostensibly meant to review. One piece sealed with a black dot of wax caught his eye. He cracked it open, scowling as he dusted the crumbles of the seal from his lap before he unfolded it to read. The words inside left him feeling sad. And maybe there was a more poetic word for it — wistful, reminiscent, darkly charmed — but those three letters fit best.

He’d never liked to feel sad. In fact, he’d been running from it since he’d been born. He’d found the best remedy for it was to blot it out with pleasure. Here in that stuffy cabin, however, _sad_ had cornered him. He relented to it glumly, feeling his shoulders sink as a heavy breath filled his lungs.

Caspar, trained to interpret his mincing sighs and roll-of-the-eyes and gasps and moans, caught sight of his submission. He frowned and set his axe aside before hobbling forward to sit beside him. Linhardt leaned towards him to rest his cheek against his shoulder. 

“Caspar,” he muttered to him finally, “I have a proposition for you.”

“Hmm?” Linhardt leaned a little closer to that nice rumbling in his chest.

“If by some impossible statistic I expire before you do, you mustn’t let the royal archivist write a single word about me.” Caspar huffed an amused sound.

“That isn’t a _proposition_, Lin. That’s like... I don’t know, a promise.” Linhardt hummed.

“Well, call it whatever you like.” Caspar brushed his fingers through his long hair. Linhardt closed his eyes and let him, focusing on the pleasant draw of his calloused fingers against his scalp.

“Who’s going to do it, then?”

“Not you.” Caspar laughed.

“Obviously.”

“_I’ll_ do it,” Linhardt sighed, as if he’d somehow been put upon by this task he’d himself proposed. Caspar’s fingers swooped sideways to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear.

“I don’t think people are supposed to write their own obituaries.”

“Yes, well, I’ve hardly been interested in following convention before.” Caspar laughed again and settled his chin against Linhardt’s crown.

“I guess you’re right. So what is yours gonna say, huh?” Linhardt thought about it for a moment.

“That I was brilliant and kind and handsome and well-missed, of course,” he sniffed. “I suppose that I will include something about always cleaning up your messes as well.” Caspar snorted. “And that my heart was yours, and that yours was mine.”

They listened to the creaking of the coach’s wheels for a long time.

Linhardt’s eyes settled on the neat print of that letter again. 

It was sad. But why? A fairy tale written in the opposite direction wouldn’t have been any more true — some story about heroes fighting arm-in-arm to bring about a new dawn, their dedication to their king rivaled only by their dedication to one another, and pock-marked with candy-shelled words like _true love_ and _darling_ and _sweetheart_.

Their love hadn’t been a bon-bon. It had been a theft: invasive and too-intimate, the rummaging-through of places meant to be left unseen. Not a killing, not a war, but something that the neighbors goggled over and whispered _what a shame_. Linhardt had seen it manifested in the longing desperation of a schoolboy crushed by his dearest friend’s greed; in the drunken stare of a freshly married groom who had always been lonely but had in that very moment realized that he was alone; and in how the two of them had clung to each other beneath the sheets of a sick bed like the last cords of a rope ready to break.

_After the war,_ that tactless archivist had written, _Felix and Sylvain inherited their respective titles of Duke Fraldarius and Margrave Gautier, and set to work restoring Fodlan. Each led a busy life, but that only seemed to enhance their friendship over the years. Each became known for making surprise visits to the estate of the other, in order to deliver the latest taunting in a friendly but relentless game of one-upmanship. In their later years, they became so close that they passed away on the same day, as if conceding that one could not live without the other. _

Linhardt plucked his pen from his pocket and speared through the words on the page until only the final seven remained.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys... that’s the end! 
> 
> A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has read, kudo’d, and bookmarked this story, and an extra-special “gosh, thank you so much” to the commenters who have stuck around along the way! I write these things simply because I love to dump all of the crazy stories living in head onto paper (er, screen), so I have been totally blown away by your truly wonderful feedback. 
> 
> I also know from reading this feedback that this ending doesn’t satisfy most of the fantastic questions/ideas/interests you all shared, and it KILLS me not to add on an epilogue with Sylvain and Felix finally being no-strings-attached happy, or to explore Portia’s adventures of being a woman finally living for her own interests, or Linhardt engaged in some very sassy orgy, but here we are, sticking to my grim little outline. Please forgive me. 
> 
> In closing, alongside another huge THANK YOU, I would like to shoe-horn in a few of my headcannons for this story that may have been less straightforward than necessary for, you know, literary reasons. 
> 
> 1\. The Gautier crest: Sylvain’s father’s obsession over his son’s crest and subsequent marriageability wasn’t simply political, but also because he knew that his crest would kill him, and that the kingdom would be at risk if there was not a wielder of the aptly-named Lance Of Ruin ready to protect the northern borderlands. 
> 
> While even Linhardt in all of his reluctant brilliance doesn’t understand the root cause, what is known is that the Gautier crest eats away at its bearer’s vitality in a manner that can be contagious to those most intimately close to them. The effect varies (e.g., Sylvain’s father lives far longer than he had at first expected, whereas his mother was unusually affected by her husband’s crest and died young). 
> 
> Unfortunately, and perhaps as inherited matrilineally, Sylvain was particularly susceptible to his crest, and would have likely even preceded his mother’s age at death if not for the fact that Felix’s crest was diametrically opposed to his. Eventually, however, the Gautier crest began to sap away at the Fraldarius crest as well.  
Aware of these ramifications, Felix and Sylvain remained together until the end. 
> 
> 2\. Pairings: Who doesn’t love a little pairing bingo? Did you catch them?  
Sylvain/Felix  
Caspar/Linhardt  
Dimitri/Marianne  
Lorenz/Leonie  
Claude/Hilda  
Ingrid/Dedue (eventually she’ll sort out that whole gardening thing)  
Dimitri’s daughter/Claude’s son  
Castor/Claude’s daughter 
> 
> THANK YOU!!! <3


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